Limit house mates internet usage

ConTRo13R

ConTRo13R

ConTRo13R

Soldato
Joined
3 Mar 2008
Posts
3,147
Location
Canterbury, Kent
Basically have a house mate that torrents so ******* films and music that the rest of us four are left with internet that crawls along, basically can't even load up a youtube video, (within an hour!)

All we have is the basic O2 router they sent us when we set up the internet.

Is there anyway i can limit his usage somehow? As after months of asking him to stop he has become bulshy, and has nothing to do with us, doesn't speak to us when he very rarely emerges from his stinking room and denies that he downloads anything.
 
Not without changing the router, though if he won't moderate his behaviour a pair of wire cutters might be more effective...
 
without changing the router your best bet is to unplug it and when he tried to plug it back in all of you confront him (you could beat him with slippers at this point) and get him to change his ways.
 
tolien said:
Not without changing the router, though if he won't moderate his behaviour a pair of wire cutters might be more effective...
Click to expand...

Then we all be with out internet :eek: its wireless you see, big house and cat5 everwhere is not feesable lol

hmm a change of router it will be :D suggestions?
 
im not sure if its in the o2 router, but in my old d-link DI-604, I have options int he firewall section to limit access to ports/ip's on a schedule, so if i wanted I could block access to all ports on a specific IP address between the hours of 4pm and 12am.

If your o2 router has something like that you could block all access to the net for him for a few hours a night and just blame it on o2, then the rest of you have full net access for a bit :) obviously its not a long-term solution but could make him think twice if you can just limit his net access when ever you wish
 
Open DNS is quite a nice idea, just make sure you change the admin password of the router if he knows what he is doing. However if he works out your cunning plan and has physical access to the router, it's quite easily reset.

At that point I'd probably beat him with slippers as suggested, but with the addition of my feet inside them.
 
Block all ports except ones required for web browsing.
Move out.
Sleep with his girlfriend while he's torrenting.
Smear fishpaste on unseen surfaces in his room.
Move him out.
Use a Linux PC/custom router to monitor data and make people pay a percentage of the bill based on their traffic.
 
Last edited:
yashiro said:
Block all ports except ones required for web browsing.
Move out.
Sleep with his girlfriend while he's torrenting.
Smear fishpaste on unseen surfaces in his room.
Move him out.
Use a Linux PC/custom router to monitor data and make people pay a percentage of the bill based on their traffic.
Click to expand...

I'm having some similar problems to the OP. Yashiro, how do you set up a Linux PC to do this? I have an Ubuntu one kicking around.
 
If you've got a spare machine kicking around put a 2nd network card in it and download something like pfSense/m0n0wall/ClarkConnect etc. all pretty good, the traffic shaping in pfSense is what I use to control my house mates.

Also have Cacti installed on it and as we all have our main machines hard wired into a managed switch I can traffic graph each connection and see who is consuming the most bandwidth each month.
 
That's utterly disgraceful and anti-social behaviour on your housemate's part, you should just confront him about it and tell him to at the very least use rate limits and reduce maximum concurrent torrent connections.

If he refuses, then yes, slippers may be needed, although I'd recommend a hammer ;)
 
Even if you rate limit him - the sheer number of connections that torrents use - even when limited fairly low - frags most home connections/hardware :(

Sorry but the only way to deal with this is to be confrontational - something I've had to deal with myself - it was only after threatening to break someone legs that they scheduled torrents to only run from 4am til 9am. I really can't stand inconsiderate people.
 
My housemate used to seed torrents all the time using maximum bandwidth, I got sick of having to constantly tell him to pause his torrents so I could play games or watch youtube, also he had no idea what maximum connections were, so our router would restart itself all the time...

I ended up one day removing all the torrents from his uTorrent (100+) and secretly set up remote management so I could access his torrent settings remotely whenever I wanted. Whenever I had any internet issues I'd just remove all his torrents and that would fix it every time :cool:

It was only about a week before we all moved out when he discovered why his torrents had been mysteriously disappearing :D
 
Confrontation has passed the threats stage! this guy is an *** and we have gone about renewing contracts for the house without his involvement.

This wasn't done sneakily, we made him fully aware of what we where doing and why so i think his attitude now is, I aint gonna be there much longer i'm gonna screw it all i can!

I going to look into this OpenDNS thingy
 
Yeah opendns is a good way of blocking things.

Used to use it myself to block torrents to my old housemate.

If I remember rightly you can also do a black list of sites that you want to block so I just added lots of the big sites to that.

The funny thing was I upgraded my router and then i could also block his pc's mac addy.

He ended up getting around that by accessing the net directly into the modem when he thought people were out or at 3-4 in the morning.

House sharing is just not worth the hassle hehe.
 
If you router has keyword blocking, you could block the word "torrent". This will stop him getting onto most torrent sites. You could also block the main torrent sites, which would be..

mininova
The Pirate Bay
TorrentSy
TVRSS
ISOHunt
PointBlank
 
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