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Bandwidth Shaping / Throttling - how to get rid of bandwidth hogs??


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Posted

I was wondering is there a linux distro that you could install on a machine with two nics for bandwidth shaping/throttling or whatever it's called. (a bit like the way smoothwall works) - I do a bit of work for a hotel here in Ireland and they have a DSL line (7Mb down,784Kb up) and now and again they have speed problems surfing hotel sites etc. which is an essential part of their business, and their I.T. company based elsewhere has trouble logging in via logmein etc. and after some quick investigation I found out that they give free wifi and wired internet access to their customers and it's all on the same line!!! They're all on one LAN and they're trying their best to not get a second line in due to the current economic climate. There were speed issues yesterday for example and I did some checking with wireshark (learned nothing as I don't think I know how to use it properly) and I got a trial version of PRTG traphic graffer and I found out that nobody was taking the bandwidth at the time (although I think I got there just a few minutes too late) - the local pings to Dublin (30miles) went back to 50ms, which although terrible by US standards, was ok. when the speed issues were there we had pings of 500ms and above...

Anyway, to get back to the point,

I was wondering if there is some software or a linux distro that can be used to allow certain IPs more bandwidth than others, and/or prioritise HTTP traffic or block P2P, and I could put this "router" PC between the ADSL router and the LAN switch ???

Posted

iptables?

You could limit certain ports depending on the IP address, Also having different subnets per department would help.

Posted

Install PFsense and setup QoS (quality of service). This will allow you to block certain traffic, rate limit and de-prioritize certain traffic and prioritize stuff like http traffic. Its also free. You will just need a reliable PC, so something like a low end core 2 will do fine.

Posted

why dont you just get a cheapo linksys router and throw dd-wrt on there.

Posted

I've had issues with QoS on a DD-WRT powered WRT54G, craps out soon as the throughput on the WAN goes above 20Mb. DD-WRT is nice though.

Posted
I've had issues with QoS on a DD-WRT powered WRT54G, craps out soon as the throughput on the WAN goes above 20Mb. DD-WRT is nice though.

yeah i suppose if theres heavy traffic from multiple stations a wrt54g would failsauce, but you could probably get a wrt310n pretty cheap, maybe 60-80 bucks, or a nice super G router.

Posted

Thanks for all the posts guys. for some reason I didn't get an email telling me there were replies.

I'll look into smoothwall QoS as I have installed smoothwall before and have an idea how it works.

a quick search reveals this mod:

http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7922

so I'll look into that also.

I'd love to get to grips with iptables but I'm not sure I have the time to learn it at the moment.

As for linksys + DD-WRT / tomato - I've already got the hotel to buy a TP-LINK switch and TP-LINK wifi AP (both very cheap chinese models but they do the job nicely) - so I'm not sure if I could now get them to buy extra kit. but if anybody has experience with tomato QoS and stability (over 10 users at a time) I'd like to hear it.

Posted
I've heard IPCop works pretty good and it's point click next next next to install.

Looks nice alright. I might give that a go. Thanks!

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