Annoying housemate

miceormen

miceormen

miceormen

Associate
Joined
26 Feb 2008
Posts
437
Hello All..

I live in an area where Virgin Media provide a seriously over-subscribed service (England, then) and so there are a limited number of slots in a day when I can get a reasonable ping to play my favourite games (COD4, 5, TF2, the like).

Unfortunately, I have a housemate who, despite all of my best diplomatic efforts wants to download endless amounts of movies, music etc. He leaves the house and locks his computer away in his room with utorrent on. How sociable. The ultimate downside to all of this is that our internet is registered in my name, which is why I asked all of my housemates (the others very understandingly complied) not to download illegally.

I have admin access to our router, and aside from simply pulling out his ethernet, is it possible to lock his specific machine out of it? The router is a D-Link dir615..

Cheers guys :p
 
If the router is in your room pull out his cable and lock your door for 24 hours, that will learn him.

Then ask again for him to respect your wishes or you will resort to giving him limited access during the day through traffic management.

Also you need to make sure the router is locked away otherwise he could just reset the thing using a pen and have freedom to do as he pleases
 
I know its childish but if he feels like it is acceptable to leave you with crippling net access so that you can't browse and get a reasonable ping, just unplug the cable. I would.
You have warned him, I think its really selfish of him to go against your views. Perhaps you could show him the problem of why you are asking him to stop downloading at peak times and only do it overnight?
 
Last edited:
If the router has a firewall you should be able to block all incoming/outgoing traffic to his IP on the LAN, although this requires him to have a static IP and for you to know it :)
 
HaMMuS said:
If the router has a firewall you should be able to block all incoming/outgoing traffic to his IP on the LAN, although this requires him to have a static IP and for you to know it :)
Click to expand...

Could also do it via MAC filtering (Yes, I am aware that it can be worked around). But then again, with access to the router config, you can specify a static ip anyway.
 
although the internet is in your name, who pays for it - if its you then do as you please, if you share it then just limit the bandwidth to 50/50 so he can never use more than 50%
 
See this come up a lot on forums and shared houses. If I ever got a shared house I'd lay down some rules from the start.
With Virgin, surely if he leaves his torrents on between 10am to 9pm you are soon going to go over the usage limit of a few gigabytes which will cap you at about 25% speeds for a duration of 5 hours which is not what you want.
So this never happens again and to sort it out permanently I would do something like:

1: Lock router in a cupboard

2: Setup static IPs for people's equipment by Mac and limit the number of IPs dished out to the same as the number of PCs/Laptops connecting. If they change their mac then they don't get assigned an IP by DHCP and you always know what equipment is/will be connected.

3: Block torrent ports between hours 10am - 9pm.

4: Turn on QOS and create an X way split, where X is equal to the number of people in the house that PAY for use of the internet.

5: Block big downloads during the day as well if possible by setting usage caps. Not sure if many routers can do this.

Get a good router and turn on logging. If you see anyone still abusing it during daytime hours then pull their access.
 
If it's shared cost for the net access then I'd go with what's proposed above and setup QoS, assign static IP etc , but if you pay for the net access yourself and you're just letting the rest of the house use it out of the goodness of your heart, then I'm afraid his CAT5 would be out of the socket as fast as I could move! You've asked him already to do downloads 'out of hours', if he's not willing to schedule them, see how he likes having NO downloads at all. A few days without any net access at all should bring about a change of viewpoint...
 
jaybee said:
See this come up a lot on forums and shared houses. If I ever got a shared house I'd lay down some rules from the start.
With Virgin, surely if he leaves his torrents on between 10am to 9pm you are soon going to go over the usage limit of a few gigabytes which will cap you
Click to expand...

There is no traffic management with Virgin's top package, as far as I'm aware anyway.

Thanks for all of the tips guys, I've set up QoS which made a reasonable difference, and used MAC Filtering to just block his internet access when I need to. It is a shared house, we all pay equal amounts for the internet, I was just smart enough to password the router before he even realised it had been delivered. :p
 
Invictus said:
make a vpn
Click to expand...

huh?

Get a central server (old pc will do) and use that as a download box

Set shares up etc, so everyeone can manage it. When you want to play games, turn the downloading app off

This is what I did in a house of 6 guys, gaming was fine, I just asked them not to use youtube etc during certain hours

The server kept them busy most of the time anyway :)
 
With DD-WRT, you can disable the reset button. So if you put that on he can't reset it, hehe.
router6.png
 
Edward you had me excited then :P The DIR-615 isn't supported by DD WRT. : (

Though I will be putting that on the wrt54g at my rents' house so my little sister stops faffing with it. Cheers :D
 
Do what Bledd suggested. I've used that in tons of shared houses and it's always worked out well.

There is also the advantage of it being left on overnight without keeping people awake - harder to do if someone is downloading in their bedroom...
 
For a start why not simply disable UPnP? He will still be able to download but without an open port he won't be able to make incomming connections and things will slow down for him. If you have a spare machine that could be used as a proxy box, and you feel like a laugh, you could send all web traffic from his machine to (originaly I did list a few 'disgusting' suggestions here, but they are filtered out :(, all I will say is that one of them involved a couple females and a cup). Perhaps when all of his websites lead to that he will be willing to compromise :D

At the end of the day though, your connection, your rules. If he doesn't like it, he can pay for his own, seperate connection.
 
Last edited:
FrenchTart said:
Do what Bledd suggested. I've used that in tons of shared houses and it's always worked out well.

There is also the advantage of it being left on overnight without keeping people awake - harder to do if someone is downloading in their bedroom...
Click to expand...

Yup

Hard drive prices are super cheap, especially when divided by multiple people :) And you get to keep the lot when you move out
 
i have had similar problems when i was house sharing.

what i did in the end was give them two options.

first option is to pay less on the internet say it is £30 total i pay £15 the rest pay £5 which gives them basic internet access.

if they want more access then they have to pay for a BT line and get their own internet.

you can't have two power users on the same internet line. it just doesn't work.

power user = anyone who does more with the internet than send emails and go on facebook etc.

torrents, games...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom