How can you prevent one computer from sucking away all the bandwidth on a network?

Joined
Mar 25, 2004
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23
Imagine the following situation:

User 1 and 2 are on the network.
User 1 utilizes the network. User 2 then utilizes the network as well, sucking away a great deal of bandwidth (if not all) from User 1.

Is there any way around this? Putting limits?
 
IIRC QOS packet schedualling is what you want. although thats about all the help i can offer, i dont have this problem anymore, i did years ago when i was on a 10mbit hub
 
Can you clarify on that? Google is not spitting out a lot of info on that. Is there any particular program you need? How exactly does it work?
 
its on nt4, 2k, and xp, its used for schedualing packets and giving them a priority, like i said, i cant offer much help on it since ive never had a need to use it
 
The only thing I came across was a Sygate Network program, but that costs.

Does anyone else know of any free programs for this?
 
on 2K Server just make sure that QOS packet scheduling is installed in network properties along with your TCP/IP etc....

QwertyJuan
 
are you on a managed switch? is this traffic LAN traffic, or traffic going out through your WAN connection?

if it is lan only traffic, and you are on a managed switch, Get into your switches console, and set the bandwidth hogs port to 10mbit/half duplex....

If this traffic is going out through your WAN (internet) connection, if you have a router that supports it, you can limit that persons bandwidth via thier mac address, ip address, or perhaps even on a per port basis if you rrouter upports that.....


thats all I can think of for now....perhaps I will think of something else
 
Sorry, but I really am not a very experienced networker and understand very little of what you wrote.

I really do not have 'a server'. Basically, I have a cable modem (Toshiba PCX1100) connected to a router (Linksys BEFSR41 Ver.2) through the WAN port and then 4 home machines through the ports. I dont' think my router supports that sort limiting bandwidth.
 
so this is at home I assume?
you could take away all the food of whoever is sucking up the bandwidth or something...:p
 
find out who it is
go on their comp
go into device manger
bring up the proptries for the nic
click advanced
http://morpheus256.is-a-geek.com/speed.jpg

select the slowest one there (image on yours may be different)

if they are using all the internet bandwidth this wont help at all.


why dont you give us more info as to HOW they are sucking up all the bandwidth.
 
If I'm playing online and another computer wants to visit a website or some such, I lag. I really do not have a problem with getting my ping shot up a bit but other users may suck up all the bandwidth for a second, causing a connection problem to appear in the game for that one second, which is annoying as hell for online gaming and streaming.

What I want to do is make it so that of my 3 MBit connection, at least a certain amount if reserved only for me so that I never completely loose the connection. I use Windows XP on my machine and 98s on the others.
 
if they are visiting websites, and your playing a game online, they would not be using most of the bandwidth.

im sorry but with a consumer router, there is nothing more i can do to help
 
Now you know why CISCO equipment costs thousands of dollars, the are reasons for it. Consumer level market equipment like routers, switches and such have much lower standards during high bandwith transmission. Not to say they are crap, *some are though* but lets take for example the T1 line I had connected to my LAN party place which had a CISCO router *forgot model* and high end 3com switches.

Granted a T1 is VASTLEY more stable then a DSL connection when put under heavy load, but I remember that we had about 25 people ranging from downloading pron, to surfing the interent to playing Quake 3 and ping rates never suffered as a result. CISCO's equipment it built to VERY high tolerances to allow maximum speed possible, reduced ping rate loss during heavy packet sending among a host of other things.

Another case in point, my friend had a very high end DSL connection a year ago hooked up to a CISCO router and I believe a CISCO switch. We are able to hammer that line when we wanted to download together and still be able to play most games and surf the web. Only time that ping rates suffered was fast paced FPS games like Quake or BF1942, then whoever was downloading had to stop because of the increased latency.

Linksys equipment does what its designed to do, home users do not require such high standards of packet sceduling, latency timing ect... ect.... case in point, my coworker recently got high speed wireless and she bought a Linksye 802.11g router with 4 sport switch. When she starts hammering that sucker with downloads, in about an hour flat, that router just craps out completely? WHy? Becasue the internal design, circuitry, built in OS among other things are not designed for that kind of bandwith usage.

In other words, you get what you pay for. Home market equipment will not perform as well as what you get at work office because the demands and expectations are vastly different, thats just how it is.
 
yeah, I have a similar setup at my home, I run webserver/mailserver/dns server/2 game servers all on my 3mbit/256kbit, and I never have a ping above 90 in games. My FreeBSD router/firewall box does some very cool QoS on my traffic and sets priority and total outgoing/incoming bandwidth, and can do it on a per port/protocol/mac address/ip address/subnet. If it is really something desperate for you, you should look into http://clarkconnect.org and setup your own router with it. it takes no experience w/ linux at all, and it allows you to do bandwidth limiting. its free too:D
 
It might be that you have a slow connection to began with. I know some cable/DLS service can be slow like in the 256bps/128bps range, and with that speed you can have the same effects you are getting. This means that even a high dollar router can't even help you.
 
Originally posted by draconius
My FreeBSD router/firewall box does some very cool QoS on my traffic and sets priority and total outgoing/incoming bandwidth

Where can you buy such a router? Is FreeBSD a company?

Originally posted by Zardoz
It might be that you have a slow connection to began with. I know some cable/DLS service can be slow like in the 256bps/128bps range, and with that speed you can have the same effects you are getting. This means that even a high dollar router can't even help you.

My connection is 3 Mbit up / 256 kbps down. That should be enough for two home users.

In any case, looks like a solution to this problem is a lot more difficult and expensive than I thought :(
 
im at a loss for words....
freebsd is an operating system, based on the bsd kernal (anyone feel free to correct me here if im wrong) which is basicly a *nix distro
he is running this on a dedicated computer with 2 network cards

also, if your connections is 3mbit DOWN and 256 UP, you should not have any issues, unless you are hosting the games.
 
Originally posted by HardOCPTiger
Where can you buy such a router? Is FreeBSD a company?



My connection is 3 Mbit up / 256 kbps down. That should be enough for two home users.

In any case, looks like a solution to this problem is a lot more difficult and expensive than I thought :(


Speed wise you should have no problem. There must be a router/network problem. there is a lot of things that you can do, and have been discussed. good luck to you...
 
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