[fefrie]

I’ve got a problem with an errant roommate that seems to be slowing the router down.

I have a buffalo whr-g54s router with a broadcom 200mhz chipset running ddwrt mini.

I’ve got the router set for no more than 1024 connections, because I don’t believe that the router can handle any more connections, and I’ve got the TCP and UDP timeouts set at 600 and 120. I don’t want to set the timeouts any lower because I want each active computer websufing to have the ‘zippest’ connection possible, and I think that an open active connection is easier to reuse than starting a new connection.

My internet connection is a 6mb down and .5 up.

Using QoS, I’ve limited bittorrenting to 3mb down and .2 up.

We’ve got up to seven people on the internet at any time, so that’s the max I’m going to allow for torrenting. It may be slow, but 3mb down was what we used to be getting.

For months and months the internet connection has been chugging along fine and then a girl’s visiting boyfriend tells everybody that they should set their global connections to MAX and that will make the downloading of torrents faster, inspite of the hard cap of 3/0.2.

Previously, I would see connections per laptop anywhere from 0-30% of the total max connections of 1024

Recently, I’ve been seeing 2 laptops connecting to the router and each on their own or combined would add up to the 85-90% level. Basically, they were eating up all the connections and websurfing would come to a crawl.

I tired using access restrictions to block bittorrenting, and it did an ok job. I would see the connections drop a little bit, but the amount of bandwidth being used would still be at the cap of 3/.02, but the load on the router would increase to over and above 1, again slowing down the zippiness of the connection.

Lately I’ve been not using access restrictions anymore, but instead I’ve been turning off port forwarding to that laptop.

Connections have dropped drastically and the load definitley has decreased.

Short of asking the people to return their connections back to previous (which I’ve already asked and got the ‘yeah yeah’) Is this the best way to limit the torrenting to keep the web surfing fast?

[phuzi0n]

Most of the connections that torrent clients use are UDP packets they send out that aren't persistent. If you want to limit their connection counts then you can create a firewall rule that limits it. If they're creating lots of TCP connections then you can make individual limits for their IP or mac address as well. You can save this to your firewall script on the admin->commands page.

iptables -I FORWARD -p udp -m state --state NEW -j DROP
iptables -I FORWARD -p udp -m state --state NEW -m limit --limit 60/minute -j ACCEPT


Disabling port forwarding is really effective at slowing down P2P but it's also very obvious that you're doing it, so they may start complaining.

[fefrie]

It seems that it's not just the one roommate running uTorrent that seems to max out the connections, but all computers including mine that seem to spike and hold from 2-300 connections to 6-900 connections.

The only real solution was a hardware solution. I went from a 4f/16mb/200mhz router to a 8f/32mb/400mhz