For the past few months there has been a lot of discord in the household
due to issues related to internet use and misuse. The three ‘adults’ in the household are all heavy internet users - I use the internet for gaming, downloading movies, and web surfing. My sister uses it to keep in touch with family and friends with instant messaging and 2-way webcam communications. The sister’s BF is the biggest problem, he indiscriminately and inconsiderately downloads gobs of crap. All these uses cannot go on at the same time, particularly the file downloading and sharing. Misconceptions about how and when this shared resource should be used has lead to many fights and bitterness - adding to the already difficult inter-personal communication problems in the house. I continue to work toward resolving these problems, but it’s becoming more and more difficult as time goes on and my efforts either fail or fall on deft ears. I think I have found some fixes that will help though …

I’ve tried to setup some guidelines in the past to alleviate the conflicts, but they are not being followed, particularly by the sister’s BF - who incorrectly believes he can use it however he likes because he contributes to paying the bill (ignoring the fact that his misuse makes the network completely unusable for everyone else. to the point of not even being able to load a web page!). Well, 2 days i did my best to explain the problem and help configure his downloading so it doesn’t bother anyone, only to have him reset it back to the way it was the very next morning. I was very annoyed that my time had been wasted, but took the constructive approach and spent most of the day searching the internet for networking tips and trying out different router firmware and network configurations. I think I have finally found the solution, or at least the best possible configuration to limit the conflicts we’re having. Here’s the details:

Before we begin, let me say that I use a Linksys WRT54G wireless Router - the first 4 generations of this device use an open source, linux-based, and flashable firmware that allows for a lot of customization and configuration options. It’s designed for home networking applications and is quite cheap (about 60-100$), but has potential to do the same kinds of things as a business-class router with a bit of tinkering. I tried a number of firmwares in the past; linksys, hyperwrt, openwrt, and DD-WRT. DD-WRT is my favourite as it’s constantly updated and improved. It also comes in a variety of flavours for different uses: mini, standard, VIOP - the later 2 having options for setting up business-type enterprises for public internet among other things. I finally went for the mini version since I don’t use all the other stuff, hoping a smaller, slimmer firmware may improve performance.

Step 1) Configure the connection to the ISP and assign all computers a static IP address on the network based on the MAC address of their network card. For bittorrent users, setup port forwarding of their configured BT listen port so that it routes directly to their computer.

Step 2) Adjust the Quality of service (QOS) settings (under the ‘applications and gaming administration tab) so that web/http use gets priority routing and bittorrent (+edonkey+gnutella+other clients) gets bulk routing. You can also set the maximum upload and download speeds of your connection so that it can optimise its management and network latency for gaming.

A recent posting on Digg.com alerted me to two other HUGE factors that greatly affect network performance, particularly with bittorrent users. The default settings in most of the the firmwares keeps track and records all connections for up to 5 days! You can imagine how easily the router can be overwhelmed with hundreds of connection attempts every few seconds in bittorrent. There are 2 ways to cleanse the router of this information: you can auto reboot the router often, or you can telnet into the router and setup a script that will tell it not to keep track of all information, and to only keep track of it for a short time. For now, I’ve just setup the auto-reboot (be sure to turn on CRON in administration tab) - I’ll look into the scripting later on. The second factor that affects network performance are the default settings for the IP filter settings (found under the Administration tab). The number of ports is set way too low (512), and the timeouts set way to long (3600sec=1 hour). So there aren’t enough ports available to handle the BT traffic and normal internet usage, and worse yet, it doesn’t release those ports for an hour. Huge oversight on the part of the firmware designers, IMO. So …

Step 3) Adjust the IP Filter settings under the main Administration tab.
Maximum Ports = 4096
TCP Timeout = 120 sec
UDP Timeout = 120 sec
> much more reasonable, eh? I mean, if nothing happens connection-wise after 2 minutes on the fastest home cable connection available, it’s not going to suddenly start working an hour later. lol. Here’s the link to the discussion I started on the DD-WRT forums - it contains older links to previous threads on the topic of BT and the linksys configuration.

I hope this has improved things at home. Only time will tell. It still doesn’t resolve the inconsiderate attitudes regarding internet usage, but it’s all I can do since my efforts on that have been ignored and even treated with contempt! Pretty discouraging, but I shall overcome! All this tension in the house is causing me to lose sleep and feel sick to my stomach. I don’t need that given my present health condition.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Geekery/Tech, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.