Managing a shared internet connection

daveyjoe

I am in a student accomodation estate with about 15 houses. We have a shared 3mb eircom connection between us all. As you can imagine the internet can get a bit slow if a lot of people are on at the same time but recently it has been a joke!

I have the username and password for the router so I can login to the router settings if I need to, the router is a Netgeat DG834.

I want to do 2 things.

1. I want to find out who is hogging the internet connection. My guess is that it's 1 or maybe 2 people downloading warez 24/7. I have blocked the major P2P ports but it hasn't made a difference.

2. If possible I would like to balance the traffic in a fairer way. At the moment, there is nothing stopping somebody hogging all the bandwidth.

I'm hoping somebody can help.

degsie

I have never used this s/w but NetLimiter is supposed to be good at sharing bandwidth and monitoring network usage.

NutJob

If ur into a hardcore solution then a pentium 266 from a dustbin with 256-512 ram and the following. This will give you ISP level control but some time and patience may be required if ur not used to linux.

iv listed Smoothwall + Smoothwall express stuff here
http://www.smoothwall.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smoothwall/
http://martybugs.net/smoothwall/

The Official docs for smoothwall express
http://smoothwall.org/docs/

Downside is no traffic shapeing just blocking

other option I like for easy value is

IPCOP configurable using a web browser and also rocks
http://www.ipcop.org/
Traffic shapeing is the way to go so u can throttle down big downloads and throttle p2p into extinction.:D