Limiting bandwidth to Internet users on office network

[chungmike]

I've got a technical situation that I have little experience with. I know someone on these Vortech forums will have a good suggestion for me.
In our office building, we have a T1 line that we share with all the tenants. Each tenant has a line into his/her office so they can have broadband internet.
Here's our equipment in order of connection:
Router from the ISP
$50 Netgear Router
$50 SMC Switch
From the switch, it goes to the individual offices.
(BTW, I put the prices to show that we're using basic hardware....nothing fancy)
Today we had a problem in that nobody was getting Internet. This is during business hours, and people were complaining. I called my ISP to ask if there was downtime, and the tech said that the connection was at 105% capacity. I checked the switch and saw activity (blinking light on switch) from a particular office. After I unplugged it, everyone got Internet again.
I talked with a guy from the office, and he said he was downloading and would stop since it disrupted the entire network.
Here's my question: How do I restrict (by hardware or software) certain users from using 100% of the bandwidth? What hardware/software is available for doing this?
My budget is not huge, but I'm willing to do something so this doesn't happen again.
Thanks for any help.
Michael

[chungmike]

I believe what I need is a managed switch.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a managed switch?

Thanks.
Michael

[Brangwyn]

You could use something like a WRT54GS From Linksys with custom firmware on it, e.g. Sveasofts firmware, that allows a degree of bandwith management on each of the swtich ports, it's only a 4 port switch (+ uplink/WAN) but if you've only got a couple of segments to manage that would fine.

Alternatively, put a cheap PC in front and use a *NIX firewall distribution that invludes bandwidth control/QoS on it like Smoothwall, IPCop, Monowall or Clark Connect

[maytricks]

Saw a DELL PowerConnect 3024 24-port Managed Switch 8H448 on ebay for $100 Buy It Now. You should check there, you might be able to find a second hand that suits your needs. Usually semi-corporate / soho switches and routers lose all their value on ebay, it is easy to pick one up.

[dhombre]

For my former job, we used m0n0wall on a WASP router. Both of these totaled about $250 plus a CF card. You can use this as a firewall and use the traffic shaping feature. If you throw in a managed switch, you could (I think) set the ports to 10Mbit half-duplex which would effectively limit every connection to 10Mbit at the most plus if you get many customers, the traffic shaping will ensure that no one will monopolize the net connection. Of course, I just be pulling this out of my rear so take this with a grain of salt. I'll ramble on about the m0n0 features applicable to you later.

Upon further research, you might want to look into traffic shaping. It's easily implemented with m0n0 and you can pull graphs to determine what IPs are pulling what percentage of traffic. You can also use it to ensure that downloads don't grab all the bandwidth at the expense of uploads.

You might also look into using a proxy caching server (i.e. squid) and restrict port 80 to this server and make everybody use this to access the net. This may also aleviate some of your traffic. Who knows, you might be able to tack on a small fee to pay for this service.



dhombre

[chungmike]

Thanks for all the tips. I decided to get a managed switch to do this. The hardware would be simpler for me. I got a nice Netgear 24 port managed switch on ebay....refurbished for $100. Brand new it's $400, so I think I got a reasonable deal. I waiting for it to arrive so I can tinker with it.

Michael

[mresell]

The upper level netgear "business" line actually have good specs usually and docs.