Router forum post

There was a forum post about how someone was having problems having to share an internet connection with 5 people. 3 On wireless. If someone was downloading something the speed was unbearable, here was my response:

As far as easy, well that's my style, but networking is. My favorite solution to this is to make a router out of an older box no one is using and at it's very basic throw tcpdump or wireshark on it and just see who is doing this, but you can get so much more sophisticated with it and use the router you built to throttle bandwidth equally(or not so equally if you choose). Smile

Other solutions are:
http://cacti.net/
http://www.openxtra.co.uk/network-manage...en-source/

You could also ARP poison the network. And see who is doing it using cain and abel and wireshark. Here is my tutorial on wireshark:
http://bsdpunk.blogspot.com/2008/01/snif...words.html

Ok so instead of finding this information out you could also work on making the problem less severe, such as reducing the number of people who are on wireless, this will help tremendously as if you are using wifi g for example, every computer connected to the network wirelessly is sharing a portion of 54mb(in your case 3 computers means 18mbs a peice), and when you compound that with possible dropped packets, just cause a cordless phone is on or a microwave or the computers are to close together, that gives you a pretty shitty connection. Also implementing a policy in your living space is going to work a lot better than having a device that shows who is doing what because people can learn how to get around those things. Saying hey we have to live together, let's only do torrents between 1am and 4am and only one person a night gets to do that or something.



So that was the response, I think I may follow up with a tutorial, on exactly how to accomplish a FreeBSD router with throttling. But right now this post is looking about a month away with my current schedule.