[techtalk] Download throttling?

[jenn at simegen.com]

Mary Gardiner wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know of a good utility I can use for this situation:
> I live in a networked house, my flatmates and I having a computer each,
> and in addition we have a 486/66 with Slack 4.0 which is solely there to
> act as a gateway to our modem, since we all dual- or triple- boot. We want
> a utility that we can install on the gateway that will allow us to
> 'fair-share' downloads - ie if anyone is downloading something big, their
> download speed is slowed down as soon as someone else tries to send stuff.

Dancer and I have a similar situation (with a 28.8K modem!).

The fairest we've found is to tweak the MTU. 

Dancer says what you really want is to implement differentiated 
services - and that while this is part of the Linux OS, there's 
damn few people who can *configure* it.

Apparently in Linux 2.2 or later, 'quality of service and fair 
scheduling', under network options. All the facilities are 
implemented by that. The IProute package is used to configure it.
And, to quote him, 'Good luck figuring out how'.

He says it's only partially effective on the downstream side of the 
link. To be properly effective it needs to be configured on the 
upstream side as well - but I imagine that 'partially' is better 
than 'not at all'.

We use tweaking the MTU. But we're rarely both doing large downloads
simultaneously, so keeping the packet size small works for us.

Dancer says he heartily recommends the 'D4x' package which is a transfer 
manager for the graphic environment, but has built in rate limiting at
any levels you like. IE: if you all use somehting like this to transfer
the 
files, you can restrict your own downloads. :/


Good luck. Sorry to be less than helpful - if anyone has a better 
solution, PLEASE speak up! We'll use it too!



Jenn V.
-- 
       "Do you ever wonder if there's a whole section of geek culture 
		you miss out on by being a geek?" - Dancer.

jenn at simegen.com        Jenn Vesperman       
http://www.simegen.com/~jenn/