Limitting download bandwidth from the client side

[Catach]

For the networking gurus

Here's the problem: Australian broadband is REALLY expensive, and
they throttle your download speeds back to half modem (28kbps) if you
download over some obscenely small download limit. The problem I am
encountering is that the throttling done by my ISP seems to be rather
agressive, and so instead of limiting bandwidth it actually kills off requests
for things that take anything more than 10 seconds or so to fetch, including
Gentoo forum posts with more than 10 replies. Web pages with large amounts
of pictures, gentoo distfiles, they all timeout after a few seconds of being
throttled on the server side.

Since 28Kbps is about 3Kbytes per second, I can use 'wget --limit-rate=3k'
to fetch things and it works perfectly, as wget isn't requesting more than
my ISP allows, and so all the packets get through. I would love some
method of doing this for ALL network apps, not just wget, so loading web
pages and so on is not an iterative process of 'stop refresh, stop refresh'.

I'm using a wireless card and have tried experimenting with setting the
bitrate, however the card doesn't seem to want to accept something as low
as 3Kbps. Also, My home network has a number of Macs and I also run
Windows every now and then, so a global solution would be excelent.
Perhaps something at the local router level?

Oh and at $50 a month for only a Gb, upgrading the plan is not an option
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[cold_flame]

OT

sorry man i know this doesn't really solve your problem, but take a look at tpg coz i get unlimited download, at only $60/month

it's not as fast as cable, but the modems are relatively well supported (look here for adsl solutions)

hope you get a more on topic answer!

[devon]

[NightSpirit]

I guess I am lucky to be in the UK where my cable modem supplier has no cap on amount downloaded

To limit your sharing (assuming you are running Linux on your router/gateway) is to use a combination of net-firewall/iptables and sys-apps/iproute2 which will allow you to set the bandwidth limitations for your connection.

I warn you tho that it is pretty complicated, atleast it is for me. There is a fair bit of documentation about (search for tc qdisc and iproute etc) but unfortunately I don't have any links to recommend.
_________________
Currently playing with Applescript ... hmmm

[really]

http://www.knowplace.org/shaper/
http://lartc.org/howto/

its though to control download bandwidth on a client.
its not like youll prevent the other end to hit you with more than you can handle

sooo.. australians are thouchy when it comes to ddosing.
dont tell the script kiddies!

get a better agreement with your isp :/

i posted a bit on the subject here not so long ago search the forums for iproute2, tc, "tc qdisc add dev eth0 root"...
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NoManNoProblem

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