determining high bandwidth users

hi all, I currently live in a shared house with hardcore downloaders and gamers. Lately our 10Meg line has been really slow due to people downloading stuff and that. Is there a way to not only find out high bandwidth users but also place limits/implement QoS so that usage is fair?

Home network setup: Internet --> cable modem--> switch --> router

Until now I have tried the following:

> Run wireshark but I keep seeing just my own traffic since the network is switched. I'm thinking of using a hub instead but I fear that this might slow things down since they're normally half-duplex.

> Thinking of getting 3com's superstack managed switch so that I can login to see whats going on...

Can anyone recommend any other managed switch types with QoS fuctionality please? Since this is for home use, I'm not looking to get an Cisco devices.

Also is there a better way of dealing with such a situation?

any responses appreciated!

The QoS on my Linksys ADSL2+ modem is ok, though I haven't really stress tested it and my line is generally underutilized. There is some highly customizable user created firmware for Linksys devices out there.

A common access point will help if you can't do port mirroring on your switch. i.e. a linux firewall before your gateway with various apps (all free) can help you understand your traffic.

The QoS on my Linksys ADSL2+ modem is ok, though I haven't really stress tested it and my line is generally underutilized. There is some highly customizable user created firmware for Linksys devices out there.

A common access point will help if you can't do port mirroring on your switch. i.e. a linux firewall before your gateway with various apps (all free) can help you understand your traffic.

thanks -- any apps you know of that does this?

any more contributions appreciated!

Backing on novembre's linux firewall suggestion. You might wana try Untangle ( www.untangle.com/ ). I keep hearing good news about it's capabilities. Haven't tried it yet though.

If you just want something basic, another consideration is the Linksys BEFSX41 router (with VPN capabilities) that I've used for a few years now. It has a tab dedicated for applications and gaming, with a sub-menu for QoS that allows you to control the bandwidth by type of application traffic, router port, and MAC address.

If you want something more exotic, a Linux-based proxy server should do the trick. I used SmoothWall for a while and it did have the capabilities mentioned.

I just recently started using ISA Server 2004. I'm sure it has these capabilities, in addition to reporting features to tell me who the high bandwidth users are but I haven't gone that far with it so far...S0lo, have you used ISA Server?

Who's giving you "authority" to control the other users' traffic, by the way ? Who made you the boss of the network ?

why not try sonicwall, has gotten most of the mentioned functionalities