TR Forums

Short Question: Can someone suggest to me a program to put on my sister's computer to limit her bandwidth to 128kB/s down and 64kB/s up? Tried netlimiter with no avail. Myspace = no gaming while she's home.

Long Question: Recently, I upgraded from a 128kb/s ISDN line to a 2.5mbit/s ADSL line, and gaming has been impossible since. Initially I blamed my ISP, but after doing some traceroutes and investigation, I could find no problems on their side. I let this go for a while, but I became fed up with it and began to investigate.

Apparently my sister has become addicted to that myspace stuff. I have no problems with this, except that her friends' profiles seem to have 1-2 streaming videos, streaming music, flash games, and pictures to bog down my bandwidth. I tried to download one to see how big they were, and it was 12.2 megabytes. I put VNC on my second computer and set it to monitor her, and sure enough the second she loaded one of those profiles is precisely when "Warning: Connection Problem" appeared on Counter Strike: Source.

I tried Netlimiter 2 Pro, and set her to 128kB/s down, 64kB/s up. I had the same problem after, so when she wasn't home I capped her at 5 down and 5 up, then tried to download the latest Office from microsoft's FTP, and sure enough her download began at 300kB/s and slowly dropped to 5. Obviously, this program doesn't work for me, since the initial 300kb/s is what drops me. I can't change my network setup much at all, since it's my dad's hardware, but him and I are planning to put her and my mom on a seperate port from the switch and limiting them using QoS. That's far off, though, since he doesn't have money to throw at a switch right now.

Can you recommend me some programs to try, or other methods of limiting her? (I'm no computer newbie, I know my way around the registry and such). Oh, and she's on XP home. I'm not sure of the version..


My network:

Can’t you use the routers QoS page and class all traffic coming from her ip as 'bulk’? I have the same router, and I see the option to do that with the DD-WRT firmware.

Dunno it that will keep you from getting dropped connections during gaming though.

I'm using OpenWRT firmware, since I (and apparently a lot of people according to google) couldn't get those DD-WRT ones stable, and my Dad knows how to screw up the router settings really bad using the Linksys drivers. Also using QoS on the linksys drivers didn't work. I'm assuming it was because she isn't plugged into it directly or something.

You wanna fix the issue? uninstallt he network drivers and tell your old man that the damn thing is fryed.
If I had kids I wouldn't even let them think the words "My Space"

Philldoe wrote:

You wanna fix the issue? uninstallt he network drivers and tell your old man that the damn thing is fryed.
If I had kids I wouldn't even let them think the words "My Space"

Sadly enough he teaches college, particularly on the topic of Cisco and general networking. He just likes to disable services on the router that I use, close ports that I have opened, keep WiFi on, despite the fact that one of my neighbors has cracked my WEP before and used huge amounts of traffic, etc. We don't even have any computers running WiFi.. Essentially, he has agreed that he wants her limited, but he wants her to have an internet connection. He's never home when she's on Myspace, so he hasn't seen the true horrors of it.

Essentially what I need is a program like netlimiter, but actually works, or a way to change some settings in windows to just plain cap her network transfer. Either that or a way of getting the same QoS options on OpenWRT that the linksys firmware has. I've been unplugging her cable whenever I game, but she's recently caught onto it, and throws stuff at me until I plug it back in.

Anyways, said program doesn't need to have password locks or a tray hide option, since I removed the tray from her user account long ago.

I think the only way to prevent the spike is to have something upstream (e.g., something on your router). I got DLink DGL-4300 -- with it I can use almost all my bandwidth on a download or an upload with very little impact on my gaming. With my Linksys I'd get ping times of 1200+ during almost any download or upload.

use the router to block all domains like myspace

Throw out the discrete router, put together a cheap simple computer, eg. 233mhz Celeron or PII or similar Socket 7 and 64mb RAM will probably do just fine, put two NIC's in there, and run something like m0n0wall on it. Also, I recommend going with something able to boot from USB memory, so you won't need a humming harddrive in there. A 128mb USB memory will be more than enough.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/

FubbHead wrote:

Throw out the discrete router, put together a cheap simple computer, eg. 233mhz Celeron or PII or similar Socket 7 and 64mb RAM will probably do just fine, put two NIC's in there, and run something like m0n0wall on it. Also, I recommend going with something able to boot from USB memory, so you won't need a humming harddrive in there. A 128mb USB memory will be more than enough.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Seconded, apart from I prefer <a href="http://ipcop.org/">IPCOP</a>

with the urlfilter and copfilter addons you can prioritise traffic, block access by content type/url/IP/time of day/quota, block exe downloads, block known phishing/exploit sites, do gateway virus and spam scanning etc etc and it's not too hard to setup (probably about 20 minutes).

EDIT: and it's got built in drivers for a whole range of nice and cheap PCI ADSL modems (I've used generic conexant based ones with good results)

Get one of these http://games.dlink.com/products/?pid=370&#DGL-4300

Good news: Sister grounded for a month from myspace. That gives me a lot of time to solve this.

Alright, so I'll look into that. I have a PII box sitting right next to me doing nothing but running my personal FTP which gets no traffic, which I could use, but I was wondering if there were any benefeits for using a faster computer, or is ~300mhz all it ever uses? I have a 900mhz PIII, a 900 and 1.2ghz AMD Duron, and a AMD K6 (not sure of clock) sitting on my floor doing nothing, but lacking RAM at the time. Would it be worth it to use one of those?

Well, I found a few 100-foot Cat5E and Cat6 cables as well as some old but working hubs lying around my garage (it's a goldmine in there). My dad approves, and said he'd stay out of the router if I went to the linksys firmware. I'd normally hate to put him on an old **** hub, but he has the college t3 lines all day to have fun with, and barely uses the net at home. Would this solve the problem in any way, or would it be the same?



If not, I'll try the home-made router thing, but I'd rather solve this without it because:
1) I'm out of ATX cases
2) I'm out of PSU's
3) I'm out of RAM

The loudness from having one doesn't bother me, since I'm used to sleeping to the warm hum of 5-6 computers running at a time. If it really bothers me, I put some Floyd on to mask it..

Oh, and I can't do the Dlink. I don't particularly like Dlink for one, and for two I'm trying to do this without buying new equipment. That Gamefuel deal sounds cool and all, but I think QoS will do the job for me, since my gaming computer is as it says. It literally runs nothing but games and ventrilo, so other traffic on it such as torrents, p2p, etc won't be prioritized also.

Thanks a ton for the help so far!!

Kurama wrote:

Alright, so I'll look into that. I have a PII box sitting right next to me doing nothing but running my personal FTP which gets no traffic, which I could use, but I was wondering if there were any benefeits for using a faster computer, or is ~300mhz all it ever uses? I have a 900mhz PIII, a 900 and 1.2ghz AMD Duron, and a AMD K6 (not sure of clock) sitting on my floor doing nothing, but lacking RAM at the time. Would it be worth it to use one of those?

I have my IPCop box on a Pentium 133 with 48MB RAM, and even that is overkill. The CPU speed doesn't have any effect on my bandwidth or pings. According to the documentation, it will run fine even on a 486.

I wish at the very least those "your other comps" are also folding, in addition to your own gaming rig.

Also running boxen naked is not a bad thing. Check out our good doctor's lair.

If you wanted to do this, you could get one of your computers to act as a proxy, and get your sister to connect to your computer as a proxy (freeproxy) is a good one, and it allows for you to control the speeds of traffic to and from the proxy.

Flying Fox wrote:

I wish at the very least those "your other comps" are also folding, in addition to your own gaming rig.

Also running boxen naked is not a bad thing. Check out our good doctor's lair.

Seti and file storage

DaveG wrote:

Kurama wrote:

Alright, so I'll look into that. I have a PII box sitting right next to me doing nothing but running my personal FTP which gets no traffic, which I could use, but I was wondering if there were any benefeits for using a faster computer, or is ~300mhz all it ever uses? I have a 900mhz PIII, a 900 and 1.2ghz AMD Duron, and a AMD K6 (not sure of clock) sitting on my floor doing nothing, but lacking RAM at the time. Would it be worth it to use one of those?

I have my IPCop box on a Pentium 133 with 48MB RAM, and even that is overkill. The CPU speed doesn't have any effect on my bandwidth or pings. According to the documentation, it will run fine even on a 486.

If you decide to go the whole hog and get IPCOP (or similare) to do stuff like gateway virus scanning / url filtering etc then you probably want something with a bit more go than a PII. The recommended system is a high end PIII with 256-512 ram.

If you just want to do traffic shaping type stuff with a basic IPCOP install then, like the man says, a 486 is plenty (a PIII450 IPCOP box is supposed to be able to keep up with gigabit ethernet).