Student house, 8 people, potential problems with the internet connection!

robjf

robjf

robjf

Soldato
Joined
31 Oct 2003
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Location
Derby, UK
Hi guys.

Im moving into a house with 7 others next year when i return to university from my year in industry. My friends are currently having the problem of people using too much of the bandwidth downloading so others struggle to meerly browse the internet!

I am not moving in until the beginning of august but id rather look into the solutions now whilst i am in enployment with some disposable income! I would ideally like to use a tidy solution such as very good router rather than using Ipcop etc.

Would netlimiter work, providing they all agree to install it how easy it to administer from one computer as this would be another possibility.

We are most likely to be getting ADSL but would what solutions are there for Cable, can the same solution be used for both connection types.

Also will be 1 ps3 which will be used online so that would need prioritisation aswell.

Thanks again guys, i am open to any solutions, i am fairly technically minded and would be willing to learnm about the most ideal solution if it was completely new to me.

Rob.

PS. I have trawelled through the search results and didnt really find any implicit answers.
 
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You could get one of the ALIX type routers that runs pfSense or monowall.

Very powerful traffic shaping and rate limiting is possible, but its not a cheap solution as it will cost a good £200 or so for the router, more if you want it with a built in wireless option. Maybe splitting the cost between people who live in the house though would make this a moot point?
 
A much cheaper option is what I'm about to implement. Linksys WRT54GS (thanks to philstansbridge) and tomato firmware has some cool QoS options to reduce the priority of torrent traffic.
 
buy a cheap shuttle system, put one or two 1tb drives in there

set it up as a shared torrent box (assuming they all use torrents), and setup utorrent to 'add any files added to directory x', share this folder and give all users the path to that folder

show everyone how to use it, and you then have a centralised torrent machine, can put all media on it to share it with the whole flat too

gigabit network really helps things along, but it works fine over 100mbit too

did this in my last shared house, limit the uploads to say 10kb, and set a download limit that doesn't effect pings

win/win for all :)




burnsey, got any guides of how to set that up?

i've got Tomato + WRT54GL

would be cool if i can torrent at full blast and game at the same time
 
if your going for adsl why not split you up into 2 different connections? i.e. 4 people on 1 adsl line and another 4 on another adsl line? its only going to be about £5-8 each person for the two connections and the adsl line.
btw i mean getting a 2nd line put in and having 2 adsl providers on 2 lines?
 
wij said:
You could get one of the ALIX type routers that runs pfSense or monowall.

Very powerful traffic shaping and rate limiting is possible, but its not a cheap solution as it will cost a good £200 or so for the router, more if you want it with a built in wireless option. Maybe splitting the cost between people who live in the house though would make this a moot point?
Click to expand...
Not quite that much, ~£130 for a 2 port version and ~£30 for an atheros based wireless card.
 
Add a decent ADSL modem to the cost too though, something like a proper PPPoA/E bridge like a DrayTek vigor 110.

WRT54GL is still a good option, but I think pfSense is miles ahead of it with what you can do when you get into it. QoS at the end of the day will also only get you so far.

The suggestion of getting two lines is not such a bad one, after the cost of the 2nd install you could say if one of your housemates has Orange just get their free crappy broadband and direct all torrents and streaming down that line leaving another decent ISP free for normal use.
 
Not so sure about getting 2 lines! Were only there for 12 months. Most of the house just browses the web and doesnt really do any downloading. But a few of them are fond of bittorrent and if im putting my name down for the connection then id rather limit a bit so they dont destroy the connection for everyone else.

Wireless would be a huge advaantage aswell, if not a must.
 
Well you'll need to know what ports peoples torrent clients are using, or make sure they keep to specific ones so you can shape that traffic.
 
I use a WRT54GL with tomato successfully in a house of 13 people, on VM 20mb. Torrents are banned, internet given top priority, things like msn transfers aswell are high priority. Usenet downloads come second, even when i'm downloading off usenet at ~2MB/s everyone can still browse quite happily, and if they use iplayer or something they will get a bigger bandwidth slice accordingly.

Brilliant stuff.
 
bledd. said:
buy a cheap shuttle system, put one or two 1tb drives in there

set it up as a shared torrent box (assuming they all use torrents), and setup utorrent to 'add any files added to directory x', share this folder and give all users the path to that folder

show everyone how to use it, and you then have a centralised torrent machine, can put all media on it to share it with the whole flat too

gigabit network really helps things along, but it works fine over 100mbit too

did this in my last shared house, limit the uploads to say 10kb, and set a download limit that doesn't effect pings

win/win for all :)




burnsey, got any guides of how to set that up?

i've got Tomato + WRT54GL

would be cool if i can torrent at full blast and game at the same time
Click to expand...

This is the best plan. In my student days I did this in several houses and it solved problems and even made things a bit easier for people (once set up correctly) - they can have a pc that's on 24/7 for downloading and don't have to turn it off all the time for updates, sleep, etc.

You may still get one or two that like to torrent on their own boxes though, so setting up a WRT with some kind of traffic shapping/etc would be a boon. Or at least something where you can easily monitor the network so someone abusing it can be slapped appropriately.
 
Theres going to be 6 of us in our house next year and I was worrying about the same thing. Cheers for all the suggestions guys.
 
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