jesus H internet

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:34 pm

right now

before i up and ban his b*stard computer right off our network and tell him to go ruin someone else's broadband

can anyone tell me ANYTHING that I, as effective sysadmin of my family's home network, can use to cap my brother's bandwidth?

my browsing etc has been running like crap ever since he got back from uni and i've recently been monitoring such as to prove the point that when he's on, everything else = 14.4k modem (as Logik can unfortunately attest from last night when a "test" video that should have taken about 5 minutes to send wasted 3/4 hour of his time)

he's nipped off out somewhere and ive sneaked into his bedroom to confirm my suspicions - tons and tons of cocking bitorrents. well ok, 4 of them, but they're such that they're taking up about 90% of our available bandwidth. currently only me and my mum are paying into the internet fund as he's financially knackered from 3 years of college education, so i dont see why he should ruin it for us (even getting on here was a slow chore) and am considering cancelling it on the quiet and going back to a 56k hardwired to my own pc and not the network.

asked him before to see if he can cap the bandwidth somehow and he's either unable or unwilling (probably both). forcing a router reset last night temporarily fixed the problem but i dont want to be arsing around with that all the time, besides life will be a lot easier if he can carry on downloading, just at, say, all of the 512k speed we used to have rather than 90% of the 1mb upgrade.

went thru all the routers menus, bloody useless, it can't even effectively block his IP (not without resetting the PC itself, i guess), let alone offer any hardware capping.

maybe there's a software solution that can be applied somehow? force all traffic to go through my own network card (it's only an 11mbit wireless, but as the network is used for nothing more than 1mbit internet and the occasional printout, it wont be a bottleneck), something like that?

cuz im sick of it

Mac · Post by **Mac** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:46 pm

I find a slap in the face and 'I know your downloading porn' normally works...

Failing that explain the predictament your in and that if it does not change you will shut down his computer with his head...

I'm sure someone else will be able to provide a more realistic and relevant answer...

Si_GTi · Post by **Si_GTi** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 6:56 pm

The only place I can think of that would be of any help would be computer security/networking forums, they can be pretty useful but it's been so long since I've visited one that I don't have any web addresses to hand. You could try searching through Google Groups (formerly deja.com until Google bought it) as there is often a wealth of information to be found with the right search terms, we use it all the time at work for those hard-to-solve issues and for general research, it's a handy resource!

Would your bro be willing to curtail his 'torrenting until the wee small hours, maybe leaving it on overnight? Although... a good few of your posts are at that kind of time in the morning

so maybe not so good.

EDIT: actually I've had another thought. If you go to Tyresmoke.net and look at the IT/AV/Home Cinema section you might find some help there. If you don't want to register as a user I am happy to post on your behalf

they're a very helpful and knowledgable bunch!

13twelve · Post by **13twelve** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 7:21 pm

i was gonna say "how about fiddling with the router"

arse...

ModifiedMadness · Post by **ModifiedMadness** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 8:51 pm

If not try www.computercops.biz

PoloCornwall · Post by **PoloCornwall** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 10:41 pm

Type Large men in to his bit torrent and download some then walk in with a few mates and go ARE YOU D/L LET ME LOOK when he shows you it will be men all over it haha

Post by **Josh_PoloGTi** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 10:43 pm

I had the exact same problem with my brother when we were on ISDN.

I ended up buying an 80cm satellite dish, pci decoder card and a subscription to SATADSL by Netsystem (Italy), just so I could browse the web!!

Now we've got 2mb ADSL, and he's not such a whore with the bandwidth, life is easier... But we very nearly came to blows about it every day until I got the satellite shiznit sorted out.

There is a way to haXXor the TCP/IP info in his registry to limit his kbps downloads... Can't for the life of me remember what it is though (and you'll have to gain access to his PC and reboot it for it to work).

Good luck mate...

Either that, or just go and give him a slap, telling him to stop being such a greedy bugger!

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 2:40 am

lol well i had a word with him when we were visiting nans, all friendly like but making a point of seeming wound up about it --- because my posting of that took an age, making me late getting there, and between doing that and getting out of the house, mum was also asking me to "fix" her laptop* because the internet was going really slowly and she was also going to be late (having to book tickets for something or other)... i thought seeing as even she could tell it was slow (and she previously couldnt tell the speed increase modem -> broadband..) i should broach the subject soon-as.

he seemed alright with it and said he would put a cap in place, which is odd considering last time i said anything about it he categorically denied that it was possible, or that it would be tolerated by other users if he tried it. hmmm. maybe he's got different software now or something. anyway, i shall wait and see at this juncture... tonight ive had a couple brief slowdowns but on the whole it's been.... acceptable... so maybe he's throttled back to 75-80% or something, which is enough to give probably a 3x speed boost to the rest of the network.

if however this proves to be an entirely fleeting thing - and i have absolutely no evidence to suggest it WONT - i'll be investigating those other solutions

particularly, josh, your one sounds interesting, and i reckon with judicious use of a 'my computer'-launched command line or edit.com (hm, he uses XP, might be troublesome?) i could do it entirely "invisibly" while he's out at work.... naturally he's very protective of his room and freaks if there's evidence of someone else having been in there (i could only have provided less evidence this arvo if i'd been wearing gloves).
your idea of editing the system file directly is stealthy, stress-free, and relatively harmless except that it would lock him down to a 512kbit transfer speed, giving everyone else 256 or 512 to play with... so cheers

* her asking me "why does it say 'network cable not connected' when i roll over that icon at the bottom? is thats why its slow?" for the twentieth time (times about five repeats each time) didn't help.... and me having to explain again... "well, just as it did every time it loads up when you're at home, and like it did last time you asked me, that's just a status report showing that" *motions with fingers* "the network cable that goes in this socket when you're at work is no longer there, and instead it's using" *more waving* "this wireless card to connect".... arrrgh. i'm all for equal rights across the sexes, but only if women stop pretending to be useless with tech to get blokes to save them the aggro by doing it for them. i see enough evidence at work that women are at least men's equal at such jobs after all

13twelve · Post by **13twelve** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 1:05 pm

can you not remote desktop into his computer?

david burton · Post by **david burton** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 1:11 pm

I thought that most bittorrent software allows you to limit download and upload speed - set this up and tell him not to EVER change it!

david burton · Post by **david burton** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 1:16 pm

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/SoftPerf ... ag=lst-0-1

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 4:28 pm

13twelve wrote:can you not remote desktop into his computer?

doo-wop now? er... um... i think thats a no. probably. ???
(note: if you havent been much in educational or governmental establishments this may not have become apparent, but the terms "sysadmin" and "network genius" or even "knows what a network is" are not automatically compatible

)

dave: hopefully, that's what he's done. he's out again and i think his pc is probably running a few downloads still (the ones i peeked at yesterday included at least two that were ETA over 24 hours)... net seems not quite as lightning quick as it should be, but it's usable at least. say, ISDN kind of speed.
the software you linked looks interesting but i've got a sneaking suspicion its for servers only, rather than the more simple network we have where the router is basically acting as the server, or a remote node to whichever Telewest server our fibre-optic cable links us to, and all computers that connect to it are merely clients.

Gareth_GT_Hatch · Post by **Gareth_GT_Hatch** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 4:31 pm

you sure hes not got a virus or something?

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 4:48 pm

No, seriously - he's a complete P2P whore-bag. Back in the day when we were sharing one K6/2 over a 56k modem (ohhhhh so bad both for downloading and viewing divx's) my one video and three or four mp3s i'd queued up would be completely obliterated and crowded out by the enormous amount of stuff (or, as it may be better known, sh1te*) he leeched and burned.

Plus he was always at pains to try and prevent our PC from giving anything back wherever possible, total scriptkiddie. However that later proved to be a good thing because of how the intrinsic cable capping works - your maximum bandwidth is shared between download and upload, but upload uses up far more of the percentage, slowing downloads. Don't know why. Perhaps to discourage people hosting their own websites from home without paying their exhorbitant server fees. So not uploading anything means super fast download speeds once on broadband (doesnt matter a crap to 56k, however)

As far as I'm aware, bit torrent doesn't allow you to block off uploading or whatever, not until you've got the entire file and de-seed it in any case. Hoepfully outgoing can be capped a bit, though.

* Ok, ok, not all of it was sh1te, he got quite a few quality things i was happy to copy off him, or just burn straight from the temp files - mainly mp3s and anime stuff, eg princess mononoke, complete series of cowboy bebop, trigun, love hina, and so forth, but also some good live action movies like shaolin soccer, all that. However, the vastest bulk of the bandwidth destruction came through dragonball Z. I beleive there were something in the region of 600 episodes, and 16 movies? He's got all of them. Every last one. Almost all of DB:GT as well, and quite a bit of original dragonball. An entire shelf of CDRs. Saved himself a good couple thousand pounds vs buying the DVDs, but damn..... it took about a year of solid download, on 56k then 512k broadband. At least in those days however we could turn the P2P off fairly safely in browsing hours as it was all on one PC.. one badly overworked pc that eventually fused out.

Gareth_GT_Hatch · Post by **Gareth_GT_Hatch** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 5:02 pm

A simple yes or no whould have done

But that's just not your style is it?

Oh well I hope you sort it anyway.