Bandwidth Limiting and Traffic Shaping

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Bobalob

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Apr 5, 2005
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Hi,

I manage a gaming centre located in the north east of england, we currently have 2 reception PC's (one used for netcafe software the other a general server) 16 gaming PC's (soon to be upped to 20) and 2 reception pc's. We have a 2mb ADSL line (2mb down 256k up) and 1mb SDSL line (1mb down 1mb up). We have a cisco 1700 series router for the SDSL and a zoom x4 router for the adsl, tying it all together with a netgear FSM726 (24 10/100 port + 2x 1000 layer 2 managed switch)

At the moment i use "Free Proxy" on one of my server pc's and set all the clients web browsers/MSN to the 2mb ADSL, everything else goes through the 1mb ADSL, which JUST manages to serv 16 PC's all on an internet counterstrike server at the same time, as you probably know, most connections (cable/dsl) do not have the upload speed to handle more than 4-5 players online at any one time, this is the purpose of our 1mb SDSL, however it is very sensitive to even the tinniest missuse and frequently players will lag, even when noone seems to be downloading (not vie firefox/ie as they are proxied to the adsl) I need a reasonably cheap solution for bandwidth management/shaping to prevent out 1mb sdsl from being maxed and lagging any online gaming.

Unfortunitly due to the layout of our network (described above) we do not have a PC as a gateway/router and i am not particuarly good with linux, plus due to our SDSL providers (easynet) we cannot log into our cisco router, and i am unsure if the SDSL will function without it.

Are there any solutions to this problem? bearing in mind we are a relativly new business, and its tough going at the moment for money.

Thanks for any help.
 
The Sveasoft firmware for the Linksys routers offers bandwidth shaping. Nothing really special but probably useful. My Dell 5324 has it as well but I don't know if your budget will allow it. It seems to be more suited for your type of service, though. I got mine on Ebay for a very good price.
 
are you familiar with linux or *bsd at all? if so, there are some viable solutions you could use that might really help you out...
 
draconius said:
are you familiar with linux or *bsd at all? if so, there are some viable solutions you could use that might really help you out...
Click to expand...
This is the route I'd go as well ( pun intended ).

For the cost of a new(ish) PC and some time working with the packet shaping tables, you could have everything you need.
 
unfortunitly my service provider gave me the cisco router and i cant do anything with it whatsoever, if i want a port forwarded i have to ring them up :/ wont allow me to log into it so i doubt it can be taken out of the loop, i was thinking something along the lines or a software solution i could put on all the client machines, but i cant find any that do exactly what i need
 
although thinking about it the router could simply be attached to the linux machine and then into the switch, this would require 2 network cards wouldnt it? and a good deal of linux knowledge id bet
 
Have your provider map all traffic to the internal linux address, then have it server as the default gateway for the rest of the net.

Just make sure that it's straight into the linux box from the cisco box, no switches or routers. Otherwise you have a ghetto DMZ which is unsecured.
 
Bobalob said:
this would require 2 network cards wouldnt it? and a good deal of linux knowledge id bet
Click to expand...

Not if one uses any of the dozen or so prebuilt distros for proxying/gateway/firewalling/traffic controlling.

Pimping my *personal* choice:
"The bandwidth manager lets you control the upload and download speeds for particular IP addresses on your local network. The module can also limit traffic by port/service."
http://clarkconnect.com/webapp/moduleinfo.jsp?id=2

Setup is simple, management is via webpage.
Smoothwall is another option in this realm.
 
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