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Network degrader?

2009-01-28 19:34:21.964535+01 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

While I'm asking about silly gadgets: I've got a few fixed IP addresses on my DSL. A friend of mine, who can only get Comcast at his house, stashed a machine on my network. He runs a personal web site and some mail off of it.

My internet performance has been sluggish recently. I'd love a little device I could plug in between his machine and the router that let me dial down his bandwidth, maybe just by simulating a bunch of extra traffic on the ethernet port on his machine. That way I could see if that machine is the source of my slowdown, without blowing his mail all together.

I guess the real issue is that I've got this little consumery DSL modem/router, and what I really want is a real router.

[ related topics: broadband Net Culture ]

comments in descending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-29 19:30:22.680615+01 by: TheSHAD0W

I've found the wrt54g to be very useful running dd-wrt micro, despite the paucity of memory. It can indeed be used to restrict bandwidth usage.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-29 16:36:43.764448+01 by: radix

the wrt54gl is made with more memory and flash to be suitable for the custom builds like dd-wrt. A brand new wrt54g has a tiny (2M) flash (as of about version 5)

you can also buy a fat new N, but you will pay

dd-wrt compat list here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

#Comment Re: Tomato made: 2009-01-29 03:46:05.733419+01 by: ghasty

I'm pretty sure you can do this with Tomato

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-28 23:40:10.391351+01 by: ebwolf

I recently got tired of my consumer-grade wifi router that came free with my DSL line. I bought a good ol' Linksys WRT54G and flashed it with DD-WRT. Not only has it extended my wifi range significantly, but I have much finer-grained control over my network. I haven't looked, but I bet it'll do bandwidth throttling... It's like having a high-end Cisco without the high $$.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-28 21:41:14.604984+01 by: spc476

If you have an old PC with two NICs, you could install Linux and use that to slow him down. Should be easy enough with iptables.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-28 21:21:14.832943+01 by: Dan Lyke

Ahhh... I'll get an admin password from him, looks like "dummynet" may be just that on the target machine...

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-28 20:29:09.299967+01 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, I'm gonna email him that shortly. Still think the device I described might have a market, though...

#Comment Re: made: 2009-01-28 19:43:08.920571+01 by: markd

Let him know you're running a network test, and it might be down for X minutes on Y day, then unplug it?

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