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In our company, there is a training room which contains 15 computers. Our employees (or external individuals) can follow a training there using these computers. However, we want to prevent the internet from being monopolized by one user.

We use a FreeRADIUS server and Active Directory to authenticate our users.

What is best practice for handling these restrictions on bandwidth?

EDIT:

Maybe I did not clarify it enough. For example if one user is signed in on a pc and starts downloading movies, the people using the other 14 computers should not be affected by his improper use of the machine.

Reaces
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Sam Hendrickx
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  • Bandwidth restriction is a network level task. As such you want to do this using your routers / switches. Your RADIUS and AD infrastructure is used for authentication, and is not relevant in throttling bandwidth. – Reaces Dec 22 '14 at 09:07
  • Thanks for the reply. But I need to restrict the bandwidth per user, how else can I do this without the use of my RADIUS and AD auth? – Sam Hendrickx Dec 22 '14 at 09:09
  • What's the difference between restricting users or restricting the desktops they use to a maximum bandwidth? Are you expecting a person to open YouTube on all 15 computers simultaneously? – Reaces Dec 22 '14 at 09:10
  • Maybe I did not clearify it enough. For example if one user is signed in on a pc and starts downloading movies, the other 14 users on the pc's should not suffer from this internet usage. – Sam Hendrickx Dec 22 '14 at 09:12
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    Not as easy a question as it sounds. If your routers support bandwidth throttling, use those. If they don't, you're hosed. The best you can do is - maybe - monitor and tell the user concerned to behave. – Sobrique Dec 22 '14 at 09:32
  • You probably don't need bandwidth retrictions — configuring a suitable queueing policy (some form of fair queueing) on the bottleneck router should be enough. You need to tell us if it's the down or up throughput that you're concerned about, and what is the exact make of the bottleneck router. – jch Dec 22 '14 at 14:14

1 Answers1

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Either you want to throttle the bandwidth on your network, by using your routers / switches to set a max cap on bandwidth usage per interface. Effectively stopping any one PC from utilizing such a large amount of bandwidth as to render the others inoperable.

Or you want to monitor bandwidth activity with for example Nagios bandwidth check.
This will allow you to receive an alert of which interface is exceeding the bandwidth limit. At which point you can go and tell the users to stop downloading that 300gb database backup with Filezilla un-throttled.

If the computers have a designated low bandwidth required purpose, I would strongly recommend base capping the maximum bandwidth on all of them. You don't need the full corporate internet line if you're watching a training video.

Reaces
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  • Great answer, thanks. Just one more thing, how would I implement capping the max bandwidth? – Sam Hendrickx Dec 22 '14 at 09:58
  • @chiodos This very much depends on the make and model of your switch / router... And is probably too broad a question to answer. Your best bet is to google bandwidth cap + your make and model of switch and go from there. – Reaces Dec 22 '14 at 10:07