network bandwidth sharing/balancing?

[canadageek]

HELP!!
i'm living in a house shared by 4 people, 5 including me. we all D/L furiously, play MMOs, and we all hate lag. is there anyway i can set up some sort of client to throttle back the load on the DLers while keeping the EVE and WoW addicts happy?

 

[Missing Ghost]

Setup a firewall with QoS capabilites such as openBSD with his PF firewall. Then use it to set the priorities on each service. For example, you would set the mmo to have the lowest latency access, giving them all the bandwidth that they want, while the BitT traffic would pass using only the remaining bandwidth. You can also prioritize by IP adress if you have any plans to limit the internet access to a certain speed/person, with abilities to use all the bandwidth when there is less traffic.

 

[canadageek]

awesome....how noob friendly is it? i'm not very experienced with *nixes and BSDs....

 

[Missing Ghost]

openBSD as a whole is not user friendly at all. However, for the specific purpose that you want to do, it IS easy. PF is about the firewall with the easiest syntax there is, people like it for that. openBSD is also about the best OS to run a firewall, and they have really good documentation on how to use PF on their website. For a slow internet connection (<5mbit/s, not LAN), a 486/P1 computer with two 10mbit/s nics between your modem and router will do the job fine. If your ISP allows only 1 IP to your site, the interface to the net can be IP adress-free (transparent firewall). What you would do is to create a transparent bridge between nic0 and nic1. Then you block all communications up and down. Then you allow back the services that you want to let through. Then you add the traffic shapping parts that you need. Also if you want to have a network connection with an IP inside your LAN to log to the openBSD (you may need this to download stuff to the openBSD box, and also to log in remotely to the box if you don't want another set of screen/keyboard/mouse) you can add a third nic that you would plug back in your lan.

internet______.............................................................................___router______LAN
........................... \nic0<ip adress-free invisible bridge>nic1/..............................|
............................################################nic2 with local __/
............................###openBSD traffic-shaping firewall####....IPadress