Customize LAN to favor bandwidth to one computer

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Home Network Bandwidth Control

I would like to customize my router's settings so that one computer in my home network is favored bandwidth-wise. There are 4 computers. Is this possible? My router is a Belkin, that I can easily access both physically and electronically.

Thanks

Answer 1

if your Belkin router does not support traffic shaping, all is not lost: you can install Traffic Shaper XP and throttle the other 3 computers' bandwidth.

Traffic Shaper XP is a free bandwidth limiter for Windows 2000, XP and 2003 Server. It combines high performance traffic shaping with the ease of use and flexibility to keep your network free of congestion.

another option would be setting up a spare box with Vyatta Community Edition.

Vyatta Community Edition is an award-winning, Linux-based, open source software providing routing, firewalling, VPN, intrusion prevention, and WAN load balancing services, among others, for your network. When you run Vyatta on a standard x86 hardware system, you'll create a powerful network appliance that can run circles around proprietary systems.

Answer 2

I am not sure that Belkin routers support this (well, not the ones I have seen).

What you are looking for is not standard QoS (Quality of Service), but traffic shaping.

I am not sure that there are any commercially priced routers that support out right traffic shaping, usually just QoS which is typically done on a service/port by service/port basis..... If however, you are the only one doing torrents or P2P (I am guessing!), you can prioritise this and it will mean that you will get most of the bandwidth.

Alternatively, again, if you are all using P2P of some sort, just make sure you are on a separate port to others and you should be able to prioritise yourself.... You want to look for something like this:

... And from this picture I just found, it looks like a Linksys router would be perfect for you - it looks like it also does traffic shaping, but called Port based QoS.. Not sure if I am right or they are...

Other than that, if you have a spare machine... but this is overkill, Ipcop can do traffic shaping.