[odiumar]

Hoping for a bit of help here....or at least to be told there is no fix.

Situation, I pay for the internet connection. My wife and I use it for various things. We also have two roommates that hook to the same router.

One of our roommates leaves his comp on 24/7 and uses Torrent(sp?). Whenever my wife and/or I log on, we are lagged out to the point of uselessness. If he is at work, and I disconnect him from the router, we have an awesome ping.

What I want to know is if there is a way that I can tell how much bandwidth he is using w/o accessing his computer? On top of that, is there a way that I can share the bandwidth equally w/o setting up one of the computers as a server? Finally, how can I tell if I'm getting all of the bandwidth I pay for?

[Advertisements]

Some routers have rules in them that you can specify to give priority to certain types of traffic - which you could, for example, use to give normal web traffic access to the bandwidth first when its needed. Others allow you to split or limit bandwidth equally.

The other alternative is considering you pay for the connection, you decide how its used. Or as its clear your colleague uses the lion's share of the connection, get him to pay the lion's share of the monthly internet fee, or chip into your electricity bill if the system is on 24/7. These actions of your colleague seem a bit selfish really, but that's not for me to say.

As to the bandwidth you're supposed to be getting, with no other computers connected, use any number of online speed tests to get a rough idea.

[Neil Jones]

Some routers have rules in them that you can specify to give priority to certain types of traffic - which you could, for example, use to give normal web traffic access to the bandwidth first when its needed. Others allow you to split or limit bandwidth equally.

The other alternative is considering you pay for the connection, you decide how its used. Or as its clear your colleague uses the lion's share of the connection, get him to pay the lion's share of the monthly internet fee, or chip into your electricity bill if the system is on 24/7. These actions of your colleague seem a bit selfish really, but that's not for me to say.

As to the bandwidth you're supposed to be getting, with no other computers connected, use any number of online speed tests to get a rough idea.

[odiumar]

Yeah...kinda figured this. The question now becomes...how do I tap into my router to find out if it can be set?

[SpaceCowboy706]

Sorry to interject here.... But no one has mentioned software ways to help out.

Here is a Debian Based Packet sniffer for winXP that i use to monitor the bandwidth on my network:
Ethereal

And Another NOT FREE packet sniffer + Banwidth Manager that is highly recommended :
Paessler

Or

If Neil doesnt follow up on how to access your routers we based utility and configure port priorities, let me know and i'll help you out.

[odiumar]

It looks like Ethereal actually gives info about the sites....I just want to know if he's using way too much and if I can stop it w/o having to run the network through my system.

[SpaceCowboy706]

One of the functions of ethereal is that you can monitor a remote ip address's network traffic.... meaning you will sit at your computer and you can see exactly how much data he is sending and receiving. There are other functions of ethereal, but that is what i use it for.

I am pretty sure that it cannot manage the bandwidth for the ip being watched though, for that you would have to use either port priorities through your router or another software manager like Paessler.

[diabillic]

Be careful, if he downloads something he shouldnt be and gets caught you will get the letter since your paying for it. What kind of router do you have? You can actually block certain types of traffic, such as bittorrent from ever entering your network in the router. And if he says anything, tell him you can't even do anything on your computer and you pay for it

Edit: If your feeling rather techish, you can investigate something like DD-WRT, which is a custom router firmware. I use it on my Linksys WRTGS54 v4 and it works beautifully. You can block practically any protocol you want , and you can also setup VLANs to segment his port on the router so you can decrease the latency that way as well.

As for your final question, goto www.speedtest.net and pick the location closest to you for best results.

Edited by Cilix, 01 December 2006 - 01:26 PM.

[odiumar]

Be careful, if he downloads something he shouldnt be and gets caught you will get the letter since your paying for it. What kind of router do you have? You can actually block certain types of traffic, such as bittorrent from ever entering your network in the router. And if he says anything, tell him you can't even do anything on your computer and you pay for it

Exactly what I want to do. He uses either bittorrent or utorrent(sp?).

I have a 2wire modem/router.