P2P Traffic Shaping For Home Use?

An anonymous reader writes "My housemate uses an aggressive P2P client, that when in use makes the Internet unusable for everyone else connected to the network. After hearing about various ISPs shaping traffic to reduce P2P traffic, I was wondering if there was a solution for managing P2P traffic on a home network. I have a Linksys WRT54G available for hacking. Can Slashdot recommend a way to reduce the impact of P2P on my network and make it usable again?"

Need more input!

[UncleTogie]

I have a Linksys WRT54G available...

Which version? Check the model tag, it should say there...

How about ask?

[Alioth]

How about just nicely explaining the problem to him, and requests he runs his P2P stuff overnight when no one is using the connection?

If that doesn't work, well, his port on the switch might mysteriously fail during waking hours.

Talk to your housemate

[Dolohov]

Seriously. An arms race is not going to solve your problem.

Man up!

[zogger]

Tell this person to stop being a hog and to drop upload and download speeds so that other people can use the net. This is a social problem that doesn't need a techno fix. Either that or tell them to get their own connection, stop sharing it with them.

Re:1st off

[atarione]

also... sorry should have thought of this before posting have u tried asking them nicely to configure their p2p client(s) in a more neighborly manner?

Re:Talk to your housemate

[ozamosi]

When I use bittorrent, I like to squeeze out as much bandwith as possible. However, I don't like when others get annoyed.

To fix the annoyance, I would have to limit my bandwidth usage at some times of the day - and I wouldn't just have to limit my usage according to when the other tenants are awake, and according to when they use how much bandwidth, but also according to how much bandwidth my ISP feels like giving me today (my ISP is seriously bandwidth starved).

If my router had good QoS, I wouldn't have to worry about annoying others, while still being able to use all spare bandwidth. I would definitely prefer this solution.

All major clients, but it still requires talking..

[Nerobro]

I love how people pimp their own client. But nearly every PTP client I've touched, has bandwidth limiting. Some of them, uTorrent included, allows you to schedule your bandwidth.

The real problem here isn't traffic shaping, but about traffic courtesy. Your housemate may not know how much trouble their causing. Talk to them. Get them to set their max speeds to 1/2 or 1/4 of the available bandwidth.

They may be surprised when their OWN web browsing gets better.

Yet this does all hinge on you talking to said housemate. Go talk. I've had the "talk" and been the person talking to the housemate. It usually works out well.

the human approach

[Peganthyrus]

Presumably saying "Hey, dude, can you throttle the hell out of your P2P? I'm getting no net whatsoever." is not an option.

If so, yeah, you could try looking into the alternate firmwares for the router; they let you throttle stuff based on ports. You'll have to look at the serial number to know for sure if you can stick that in, or spend like $80 or whatever for the WRTGL, which has enough firmware space to do fun things.

Is this a technical problem or a sociological one?

[AdamHaun]

What about talking to the housemate to get them to use a less aggressive client? Most P2P software that I know of has bandwidth cap options built in, which makes me think the poster is trying to do this under the table. How is the housemate going to react if/when they find out about it? Is this really a problem that's best addressed with technology?

DD-WRT

[Solandri]

You may be able to install DD-WRT [dd-wrt.com] on your router. It (along with other alternate firmwares) provides much better traffic shaping capabilities (called QoS for quality of service) than the default firmware. It lets you assign traffic to bulk (lowest), standard, express, premium, and exempt; based on port, MAC address, netmask (destination IP), or traffic type. Off the top of my head I believe the priorities refer to guaranteed 10%, 25%, 50%, 90%, and 100% of packets will get through.

First step would be to find out what type of P2P he's using and (if it's not recognized by DD-WRT) what ports. Drop those down to bulk priority. Raise special activities like https web browsing to express (on the assumption that connecting to an https server means you're doing something important like accessing your bank). Stuff that's time-critical like VoIP and gaming should get premium priority. This took care of 90% of the problems I had.

The remaining 10% proved extremely tricky. Newer bittorrent clients default to encryption on, and it was getting by the QoS. I tried tweaking all sorts of settings to mitigate this without success. What eventually worked was a setting anything on ports higher than 1024 to bulk priority, then specifying certain ports as having higher priority. This is the QoS equivalent of switching from allow all and blocking things you don't want, to deny all and allowing things you do want. That seems to have solved the bittorrent problem.

The only problems that remain have to do with http and ftp transfers of large files. If someone sticks a 40 MB file on a web site, the router can't tell it apart from regular http traffic, so you can't drop its priority without also affecting regular web browsing. In one case a user was running a program to download an entire web site - that was killing the network since to the router it looked just like a lot of web browsing. Same with ftp - if you drop ftp's priority so the 100 MB transfers are bulk, the small ftp files like certain software updates are also bulk.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Too many geeks lack the basic social skills. Technical solution isn't required just tell him to stop using it.

Re:My best suggestion:

[Awptimus Prime]

Or save the ten bucks a month in electricity and show him how to set his bandwidth limits in his client.

The lengths people will go to avoid social interaction these days.

More of a house rules issue than a technical one

[kungfoolery]

If you can't have a frank conversation about communal resource usage with your own roommate than your have much bigger problems than mere router configuration will ever solve.

I'm sure you guys have laid down basic guidelines governing how you'll split up paying for and using shared stuff. Like, "Hey dude, if you insist on running that 20 node Beowulf cluster in your room to crunch SETI work units all day, you should pay more for electricity." Or if nothing that specific, at least rules along the lines of "neither of us should monopolize the common area on a consistent basis preventing the other from ever having guests over."

I don't think shared Internet usage should be any different. If you're the administrator of the network at home, it seems that what you're suggesting would be tantamount to setting up bear traps in the common area to discourage over foraging by your inconsiderate roommate. Of course, if he/she is that much of a boor, maybe you have no choice.

Bottom line though: it would probably be better to talk it over with your roommate rather than putting the smack down with filters and such... in the end, there'll be a lot less resentment from both ends.

The social problems: eating it cause it's there

[Televiper2000]

Honestly, this is the reason ISPs are moving toward throttling, packet shaping, and simply capping the bandwidth. There's a minority of bit torrent users hoarding the bandwidth so that they can hoard piles and piles of movies, music, and games that they have no reasonable expectation of using. "hey check it out man, I have the entire Simpson's series dubbed in Japanese!"

Re:All major clients, but it still requires talkin

[neon_geniuses]

QoS is really a must if you're sharing a connection and somebody runs Bittorrent.

I disagree with the idea that traffic courtesy is the problem. We all want good torrent speeds. There is no reason to arbitrarily limit your torrents to 1/4 of the max upload bandwidth when the connection is probably going unused most of the time. Voluntary bandwidth limiting is still no substitute for a good router.

I have set up both (uncrippled and crippled) versions of Linksys wireless routers and a couple Buffalo routers with the same Broadcom chipsets. The DD-WRT has terrible QoS and should only be used when you need the lite version. Tomato is the way to go, as half of the posters seem to be saying.

You've already got a router up and running. Why not make it do its job efficiently? I think you underestimate the value of prioritizing web traffic and DNS queries. Before trying tomato, I put my uTorrent through the most draconian bandwidth caps I could think of. Upon switching from DD-WRT to Tomato (default settings), my household went from "my firefox doesn't work" to rock solid browsing all the time.

Don't use software to solve social problems...

[rit]

The best piece of professional advice I ever received was this:

"Don't use software to solve social problems"

This seems pretty apt here - instead of spending money and time trying to do this the hard way....

Just fucking smack him, and tell him to behave responsibly or lose his internet privileges.

Re:All major clients, but it still requires talkin

[Lendrick]

It's not just a courtesy thing. You can solve a lot with traffic shaping and other configuration, allowing your roommate to maintain relatively high bittorrent speeds and still have a decent web surfing experience. The one thing, mentioned above, is QoS. The other thing you might want to look into is the size of your router's NAT table and its TCP timeouts. If your roommate has 500 concurrent TCP connections out of a possible 512, that's going to slow you way down. If, on the other hand, you're looking at 500 out of a possible 4096, you should be in a lot better shape. You'll still *notice* when there are bittorrents running, but your internet should still be usable.

Re:Need more input!

[mrbooze]

If for whatever reason you don't feel like taking the time to properly classify the problem packets, or if said housemate might be someone inclined to try and sneak around such things by tweaking his bittorrent settings, one simpler approach is to make all traffic lowest priority by default, and then you specifically define the important traffic to be higher priority. Just don't forget the really important stuff but sometimes less obvious stuff like DNS traffic.

Of course if you REALLY want to simply deal with just the housemate, you could always identify his traffic by his MAC address and just bump all of his traffic down to low priority.

Re:How about ask?

[Chemisor]

> How about just nicely explaining the problem to him

This is not about discourtesy, it's about P2P's tendency to grab all the available bandwidth. I would, for one, like to have my browser's requests prioritized over my torrent traffic, so I could browse the net at a reasonable rate while downloading. Yes, I can set rate caps in uTorrent, but that is not the ideal solution because it leaves the network underutilized. My browser does not require much bandwidth, it requires latency, which is what the poster was asking for.