Traffic Shaping

 

Basically I have a 6meg cable line which is getting filled rather quickly from my roomates torrent connections.  I have a dd-wrt flashed linksys router, but it's not doing much to help me out on this issue.  I'm not sure what client my roomate is using, from my router logs it looks to use a different port to download and upload everytime.  So now here I am, thinking that I should go with a m0n0wall solution.  Could this device let me shape Torrent traffic for all of my LAN (upload and download), and does it have the ability to let me limit my P2P roomates upload and download speeds?  Can these changes be made on the fly while I see the downloads start to kick in and have it take effect immediately?

All repllies are appreciated.

-D

Or perhaps blocking traffic from a particular IP/MAC for uploads and downloads

Hi deezy,
Someone more qualified might be able to answer your question a little better than I - but I'll take a quick stab at it.

I went through a similar situation as you two years ago, where my housemates were stealing all the bandwidth via p2p (I believe they were using less sophisticated p2p clients: limewire, kazaa, etc). Once I got the initial setup figured out, and learned a little about packet shaping, it was a breeze throttling down their p2p bandwidth which left plenty of room for surfing and playing WoW.

As per your question about their uploads and downloads switching ports; if there really is no pattern to which ports their bittorrent clients are using, you could (in a worst case scenario) put everything but http traffic into it's own queue and put it at a lower priority. I'd definitely recommend this only as a last case scenario.

Changes can definitely be made on the fly, and you can monitor where your traffic is going. You can even subdivide your bandwidth per IP, so each IP get's its own amount of bandwidth. The bad thing about that is, everyone gets a smaller piece of the pie; whereas if everyone shares - some people might use more than the others during some parts of the day and vice versa.

Hope that helps. 

If you just care about yourself getting a stable connection (and this can be dune in dd-wrt alone)

1 upload pipe(max upload speed)
2 queues:
   everyone_queue - value 1
   my_queue - value 99
2 rules:
   everyone_rule - all packages coming from lan go to everyone_queue
   my_rule - all packages coming from my IP go to my_queue


This ensures that they can use all the net when you don't need it, but if you start uploading at max speed, they will be reduced to 1% while you use 99% of upload.