Network Control

[ProcalX]

Hi, having built a new pc, and a few minutes ago finishing building my brother a computer, and soon my sister to be joining the network, i will have to give them internet access, otherwise they'll wanna use my machine the whole time.

At the moment i have a internet connection that "does the job" (150kbps NTL)

however i am investing in a 1 or 2mbps line, however my brother is a great fan of music and such and i was wondering if there is any network software that would enable me to limit a computer on the network to a certain amount of bandwidth or speed?

or if not how to do it?

 

[Big B]

I know some P2P apps have the means to limit the bandwith used, but it's mostly for uploading. I think DirectConnect is able to do this, particularly if you use the DC++ client.
Software...not that I'm aware of, but Anti-Trend might know of something to help.

 

[Anti-Trend]

...i was wondering if there is any network software that would enable me to limit a computer on the network to a certain amount of bandwidth or speed?

Yes, there is! What you need is a proxy server. The best (and cheapest) way to do this is take an old PC and put a firewall/router Linux distro on it. For a small home network like yours, just about any old junky computer can do the job perfectly. For this task I prefer a minimum of a Pentium-class CPU, 64MB of RAM and a 400MB HDD, but you can get away with much less. The important thing is to have two network cards, which can even be as slow as 10megabit each. Then all you need is a good firewall / router distro. Anything that utilizes Squid Proxy and bandwidth-shaping tools will do the job just fine. I've had good experience with Mandrake MNF (Multi-Network Firewall), IPCOP and M0n0wall. IPCop is definately the easiest firewall distro that I've ever used, due to super-simple GUI-driven install and slick https-based web administration interface. However, there's a lot of dedicated router distro's out there I've never even tried.