first a quick overview of my situation.
we have 3 pcs hooked up to a d-link di-604 router with a cable connection
now sadly one of said pcs is constatly running 3 bittorrent downloads and leeching all the bandwidth.
now the question…
Is there any way to set the router to ration the bandwidth so that no computer can use any more than the others? the manufacturers tech support sent us a form letter about some unrelated subjects so i thought i’d try here. Also if not are there any routers on the market that will?
Me and my friend are trying to solve this problem in a way that we wont have to run any kind of server thingy or change the settings on the leeches computer.
What you are looking for is called “Traffic Shaping” or “Bandwidth Shaping”.
I’m not familiar with your router, so I don’t know whether or not it supports this feature. In general it’s not available on low-end consumer oriented kit. You would typically find these features on devices for medium sized businesses, service providers, and the enterprise. With prices to match.
An alternative is building your own router out of a single board computer, running a BSD or Linux distribution to get an larger feature set for consumer prices. For example, soon I’ll be replacing my Zyxel Zywall-10 with a Soekris SBC running NetBSD. While I haven’t yet had a need for it, NetBSD’s ALTQ subsystem will allow me to configure a traffic shaping policy to fit whatever need comes up.
There used to be a nifty little program by a company called Sygate that overcame the horrible connection-sharing problems that early versions of Windows 98 had. I think it had some sort of bandwidth allocation feature, but unfortunately I no longer recall. It’s a place to start, though.
I’m not sure how geeky you are, but take a look at the Linksys WRT54G Router. This router runs Linux, and as such can be configured or upgraded to do essentially anything you could conceivably want. I know that you can get modules that will turn that router into a traffic shaper, they might even come with it.