Bandwidth Throttling

Y.B.Sober

Hi. can anyone help me with a bandwidth throttling question? (I think that is the correct terminology).I am implementing a network with 25 pcs connected to a 2mb line using a standard eircom broadband router, unmanaged gigabit switch, linux box as proxy server and 25 pcs running XP Home Ed with gigabit nic's. What is the best way to evenly share the internet bandwidth between the pcs browsing/downloading (all 25 will not always be browsing/downloading) and again evenly share LAN bandwidth between all pcs talking over the network. Hope someone can help - sorry if this question is in the wrong forum or has been asked before but I got lost in the threads when searching for an ans.

Big P

ICS? Windows has an Internet Connection Sharing application somewhere (iirc) which should do the trick. Bandwidth is evenly distributed with it. Or at least it seemed that way many many many months ago when I did it.

Y.B.Sober

okay ...anyone got any further info on this r any other possibilities?

Blaster99

Sounds like you're looking for traffic shaping. I seriously doubt Windows has any technology for that. I would hazard a guess that there is a Linux solution around for it. I imagine you'd have to route the traffic through the Linux box for that to work. I would also imagine a decent Cisco router supports traffic shaping. Make Google your friend.

Why do you want to implement traffic shaping? It's fairly rare that anyone bothers with it and it often causes more grief than you would want. Normally you use traffic shaping to give priority to some traffic, other than that the network tends to balance itself.

Y.B.Sober

unfortunately the bandwdth isn't balanced. And it would be nice to prioritise some traffic. but a cisco router is out of the question - budget!

Moriarty

Moved to Nets/Comms.

Random

From my expeirence with ICS the host machine gets priority with all the bandwidth.

After that it tends to be first come, first served.

Capt'n Midnight

If you are using a linux box as a proxy, then squid will allow traffic shaping..
delay pools etc.

check out - http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/FAQ-19.html


don't forget to pop a big drive in there for the cache and increase all the settings..

#Default:
# maximum_object_size 4096 KB
# might just get some update files / other downloads... --> 100MB
maximum_object_size 102400 KB

#Default:
# cache_dir ufs c:/squid/var/cache 100 16 256
# - up to (80% of drive size)... 100MB with std nos. of files/folders
# note NTFS compression only gives 16% so leave off for speed.
cache_dir ufs F:/squid/var/cache 1700 16 256

[edit] if you've noticed NTFS it's because I'm running SquidNT - so you could configure one of the windows boxes to act as the proxy if you don't want to mess with the linux box.

Another way of reducing the bandwidth is to block sites
or if setup a SUS server if you have windows server 2000 or 2003 and many windows 2000 PRO/XP PRO clients

Y.B.Sober

linux box is definately my proxy. going to be using a cheetah hdd on server for high write speed

Stephen

I live in a student house with a 512k dsl connection shared between 7, so you can imagine things get slow from time to time. We have an old PC running ClarkConnect (www.clarkconnect.org) and it does the trick. Its running Squid in transparent mode, and allows us to throttle bandwidth per-lan IP if we want.
You'll need 2 network cards in the linux box to do this by the way.

JDxtra

LAN bandwidth shouldn't be an issue with only 25 PC's.

To reduce broadcat traffic I'd recomend implementing some form of intrenal name resolution such as DNS (or even WINS).

As for the external internet access - for standard web browsing you may not even need to implement any sort of bandwidth throttling as 2mb should be plenty. It does depend on the type of users though and if you do or don't want to allow them to download music / movies all day...!

Y.B.Sober

i expect lots of downloading. thats the main reason why i need the throttling. will try the clarkconnect software.