Any way to temporarily kill a PC's network connection?

Factual Questions
1

Ok my problem is that I’ll leave for the day leaving a PC downloading or uploading, someone else in the household will pop on another PC to do something on the internet for a few minutes at random times and if it seems any slower than usual they simply yank all ethernet cables out of the router and forget to put them back in when they are done. If I’m using wifi they go in and kill wifi in the router and forget to turn it back on. So I’ll return half a day later to find all network connections were killed five minutes after I left and never turned back on :mad:

Is there some way in software or the router someone can do something like kill all internet access for a PC, and then have it automatically start back ten or twenty minutes later? Or anything like that at all? The important thing is that they wouldn’t have to remember to put the connection back on, they won’t period.

2

It would be simpler to set a rate limiter on your torrent downloads. Or, one better, kick out your current roommate and find a new one.

3

Rate limiting doesn’t work because if they notice any slowness(even imagined*) they do it, limiting transfer to half of available bandwidth did no good.

Time limiting doesn’t work because like I said it is random, they pop on a PC for a few minutes all the time.
*Once when the downloading PC was not even on they disconnected all the ethernet cables, they said it seemed a little slow.:stuck_out_tongue:

4

This seems to imply that this person knows how to log into your router and make changes to its settings, in which case I’m not seeing the point of a router-based solution.

Why don’t you instead password protect the router so that they can’t turn off the wi-fi? Doesn’t that make more sense?

5

If I do that they just reset the router and then it is unprotected, they have physical access obviously.

6

Ummm. That sort of begs the question.

7

You can put between your computer and the router a small network switch.

Then power the network switch through a mains timer or maybe a simple power strip with a physical on-off switch.

No power to the network switch and your computer effectively is offline. Turn the power back on and you have internet connection!

Of course, since your roommate is so intrusive, there’s no guarantee that he won’t tamper with this setup as well.

8

If all the cables have been pulled out of the router, I don’t see how any software solution will make any difference.

9

They have said that IF there was a simple timed kill switch they would be fine with using that, they aren’t doing it out of maliciousness. They just want full speed when they are using the internet, in fact they say that many times they have remembered to put the ethernet back in or turn wifi back on and of course I just did not notice.

10

This is a social problem, not a technical problem: you need to have words with whoever’s doing this.

11

Normally in these situations, I find that brandishing a weapon and shouting loudly work well.

Seriously, your roommate has some boundary issues.

12

Tell them not to do this. Problem solved.

If it seems slow, how will yanking all the cables out of the router make it faster?

13

They leave the cable to the PC they are using in of course, disconnecting all the others.

Anyway the fact is I don’t object to killing D/U while they are actively using the internet at all, I’m fine with it. The problem is of course remembering to reconnect everything.

Can this be done in open source router firmware? I might just buy a new router that can run open source firmware.

14

I have torrents running 24/7 and I never notice speed-wise. You gotta keep upload super low. I think I have maybe 90kb upload max and I keep my torrents capped at like 20. Download I have about 1Mb and I keep them under 300k.

You’ll get better results if you keep everything very low and nobody unplugs you than if you lose huge chunks of time by being unplugged.

15

Assuming you are running Windows XP or later you can make a simple .bat file like this:


netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" DISABLED 
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 1200
netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" ENABLED

To find what the actual name of your network interface is run


netsh interface show interface

and put that in the script above.

I am using the ping command as a timer there. It pings the loopback IP for 1200 seconds (20 minutes).

16

For clarity, you could just use the timeout command, “timeout /nobreak /t 1200 >nul”

17

Put me in “the talk to your roommate and explain that they are all sorts of retarded” section of the thread.

18

Pull the network cables (or the little wifi adapter thingies) out of all computers in the house except yours, and take them with you.

(Ideally, you should only need to do this once, and then the point will be made.)

19

This might just be workable, thank you times a million!

20

Grude, if you are on Windows Vista or 7 you can replace the ping command with timeout as Jkilez pointed out.

If you are using XP there is no timeout command and you have to use ping. If you use the ping command, note that since the interface is disabled the ping requests time out and take longer to process. So you’ll have to divide the desired number of seconds by 4.

Also you’ll have to right-click and Run as administrator, else it won’t work