Thursday, December 01, 2005

Bandwidth War

Yeah !!! It's the 1st of the month ! ...... YES ! Finally ! No more 56k modem speed !!

My Internet connection at home had been slowed to 56k for the past 10 days now.

10 agonising days. No Warcraft for 10 days already...

A couple of days ago, I deliberately stayed back to checked up on what my housemates were downloading on to their PCs that managed to hog up all the bandwidth allocation by mid-month.

I found out that one had BitTorrent running, downloading all the current episodes of this Taiwanese talk show.

The other had LimeWire, and was downloading what looked like Japanese porno clips.

All of this downloading was still happening when our Internet had been capped to 56k.

What should I say to make them a bit more considerate of the other person in the household that uses and pays for the Internet connection ?

Better still, how do you approach someone and tell them to stop downloading porno ?!

In my last job, as a Systems Administrator, I found out that this guy in Finance was downloading porn, but I wasn't sure how to deal with it. It took a lot of determination to not go and report it to his manager or my manager, as I knew he would definitely lose his job. In the end, I went and had a short chat to him and mention the name of the website that showed up on my ISA logs and he knew he was caught. I told him, if it never turned up in my logs again, I wouldn't do anything about it. Sure enough, the downloading stopped and he apologised to me for his actions and the whole affair was never mentioned again.

But this is a entirely different matter. It is happening in my own home, not my workplace. I don't have jurisdiction over him. And there is no 'manager' there to fire his butt.

This whole bandwidth issue is really starting to piss me off. Short of actually going to both of my housemates' rooms and disconnecting their cables, is there anything else I can do ?

Is there any tools out there that I can download to limit the amount of bandwidth a program is sucking ?!

Anyone know some discreet ones.. Or something I can put on their PCs that they wont notice ?

Any ideas ?!

3 comments:

mon1ca said...

I don't know if there is any rate limiting software that you can install on their PC... however, theres probably a work around...

Gimme a call and I'll discuss with you *grin*

-mon-

Anonymous said...

You need some network traffic control...

Netcom has limited to only 5 rules (should be enuff) but i dun really know how it works... download the chm to see if it is wot u need. It's a freeware anyways...

Me!

takumi said...

puchu... its actually a standard router from Telstra (my ISP). has a pretty standard GUI page but can't figure out how i'm supposed to limit traffic with it.

mon.. your workaround involves setting up a linux box !?

chi sin.. thanks will download it and give it a try.