Plain and simply, my Roubenesque housemate has a 20 “gig a day” habit. I know when he is on the computer because my internet connection suddenly disappears.

The Issue: The programs he is using to download his stuff is hogging all of our 10mb cable connection and leaves me high and dry without a connection.

The Task: I needed to control the bandwidth through my router (Linksys WRT54G) so it can be shared equally among the 3 computers and the Xbox system.

The Fix. Part 1: The router has an admin side, with all the features you need, or so I thought. First off I tried the QoS packet management utility to set priorities for applications and the ports on the router itself. This failed miserably for reasons i am yet to figure out. so, onto…

The Fix. Part 2: After a quick round of E-Mails with Visp_bofh, the tech guru, he reminded me that the router in question can be flashed with open source firmware. He provided a link that details all the available firmware for my router.

After some research, I settled with HyperWRT. This firmware basically expands the original firmware and gives you more control over bandwidth management and application control.

I set low priority to the port numbers that his download app uses, gave my computer, FTP port, pop and smtp ports high priority and saved the settings in stone so to speak.

After fiddling with some more of the settings and rebooting the router I was up and running and ready for the test.

The Test: All seems good so far, “supersize me’s” downloads are back on, on both computers and i’m still happily surfing the net, and most importantly I can still FTP.

The real test will come after my computer has been left idle for more than an hour or so. I will update when that happens later on this evening.

There are plenty of options for updating the firmware on my specific router and at some point I will upgrade to something else with more advanced features. tinyPEAP seems like a good idea, I can run a radius server and provide wireless access for people in my street at a nice little cost to them lol. All kidding aside, there is one in particular I am looking at that has loads of functionality plus it acts as a very small HTTP server for serving up web pages. That could come in handy for remote controlling the PC’s on the network.

I will write a little tutorial on all of this and add it to the appropriate section. I will announce when it is complete.

While I was surfing up the interweb looking for info on the router I came across some cool stuff. USB add-on for a mouse