'Smart' bandwidth sharing??

[fljames989]

First a little about me, second paragraph begins my issue. I use to be waay into computers during high school and early college... that was about 5 years ago. I bought a laptop about a four years ago and sort of lost touch with computer hardware. So while I can understand, I'm not in touch with what's worthwhile today.

My brother is moving up to live with me and I need a way to share the bandwidth. I own a D-Link wireless B router which has been adequate for me and my wife. I've used netlimiter to leave my wife about 15% of our bandwidth (4Mbps) for her to browse and do her work.

The problem is that me and my brother download a lot! I know that when my brother moves in, it would be possible for both of us to install net limiter and take 30-40% of the bandwidth for ourselves so that enough is left over for my wife... however.. I don't like wasting all that bandwidth. I have no problems with him using almost all of the bandwidth when I'm not home or not downloading.

Is there any sort of hardware or software I could buy/download for a standalone router that can do some sort of "smart routing" something that will share the bandwidth equally when we are all using it, but allow him to use all of it when he is alone?

I wouldn't mind spending too much for a router/hub that did this on its own. I also wouldn't have a problem assembling a new (cheap) computer just for this purpose. if there is software available. I am comfortbals with windows and linux...

I would appreciate any advice or a link to any threads that might have had a similar issue.

Thanks

 

[mikeyp410]

You can buy a smart switch for this for around 150. Other then that I am not sure about software that will take care of it.

 

[jjw]

Look into IPCop, a linux base router, they have some bandwidth shaping features. I haven't used them, but they are there. It is also possible that there is an add on package that will do the trick too.

Tom's has a little review of IP Cop, m0n0wall and other similar routers.

 

[fljames989]

Thanks. I'm not looking to spend much, but I find it hard to believe that there isn't cheap software around to take care of this server side????

 

[mikeyp410]

IPCOP is free if I remember. Check it out, there is a article on it in here.

 

[jjw]

IP-cop is free, runs on modest hardware. If you have an old PC then you are set, I think the minimum memory is ~64-128mb. For 30$ you could buy a CF to IDE adapter and a 512mb flash card and have a diskless solution. (new CF cards are mostly larger than 512mb but cheap ~$15)

Had an old Pentium 200 in the basement that worked fine.

Installation was easy, just follow the guide on Tomsnetworking...

IP cop doesn't have bandwidth sharing but it does have a bandwidth 'shaping' feature:

From the Documentation:

To use Traffic Shaping in IPCop:

Use well known fast sites to estimate your maximum upload and download speeds. Fill in the speeds in the corresponding boxes of the Settings portion of the web page.

Enable traffic shaping by checking the Enable box.

Identify what services are used behind your firewall.

Then sort these into your 3 priority levels. For example:

Interactive traffic such as SSH (port 22) and VOIP (voice over IP) go into the high priority group.

Your normal surfing and communicating traffic like the web (port 80) and streaming video/audio to into the medium priority group.

Put your bulk traffic such as P2P file sharing into the low traffic group.

Create a list of services and priorities using the Add service portion of the web page.

The services, above, are only examples of the potential Traffic Shaping configuration. Depending on your usage, you will undoubtedly want to rearrange your choices of high, medium and low priority traffic.

This could be a solution.