[Pan-users] Re: Any way to control download speed?

[Duncan]

Kurt Schilling <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 18 Jan
2009 19:21:35 -0500:

> Rick Barry wrote:
>> PAN pretty much eats up all my download bandwidth when downloading a
>> binary. Is there any way to control the speed at which PAN downloads? I
>> am using PAN 0.132 on Ubuntu 8.04
>> 
> The only thing that comes to mind would be to limit the number of
> connexions to the server. Perhaps reducing that to 1 connexion? How many
> conexxions are you currently using? As I recall some servers will place
> a limit on the number of conexxions that you can use.

Correct.  That's the level of control pan gives you, the number of 
connections per server.  Many providers limit both the number of 
connections and the bandwidth per connection, in which case that's 
generally all you'd need anyway.

If you have an unlimited per-time bandwidth account or they only track 
overall bandwidth/time and not per connection, then the above won't work, 
but... (below)

> But as far as controlling the speed at which PAN downloads, that is up
> to your ISP and TOS. There are Windows based applications that can
> throttle back your bandwidth. You might check with the folks at the
> Ubuntu forums or Alt.OS.Linux.Ubuntu for distribution specific
> applications.

Again correct.  If your news provider is effectively unlimited
bandwidth/time (effectively meaning if there's a limit, it's above your 
ISP allowed pipe bandwidth/time), you could max out your connection 
bandwidth/time, and that seems like what's happening.

On Linux, the kernel ships with all the necessary modules for routing, 
firewalling, and bandwidth control.  From kernel 2.4, it's part of 
iptables.  If you wish to control it, you'll need to install the 
appropriate userland software (probably the iptables package, plus any 
higher layer control, GUI or CLI, you wish, personally I tried several 
and found iptables itself less complex than the so-called helper firewall 
packages, etc, but that's likely because I'm a power user and had 
"advanced" needs, YMMV), plus ensure that the appropriate kernel options 
are either configured as modules (and loaded) or built-in, if you build-
your-own, or, if you rely on the distribution's kernel, that the 
appropriate modules are available and load as needed.  (Normally, the 
loading is automatic if they're available, netfilter and the kernel load 
whatever modules are needed for the defined rules.)

There are of course special purpose bandwidth shaper and firewall 
packages available, and Ubuntu probably has nice GUI options of some 
sort, but as I said, for my needs I found it much less complex just to 
learn iptables/netfilter directly, so that's what I use here, on Gentoo.  
But, I've not needed bandwidth shaping, so I couldn't tell you which 
specific modules and rules need to be loaded for that.

Another option, should you have a suitably advanced firewall/router 
appliance, such as the open-wrt/dd-wrt/tomato/etc compatible Linksys 
WRT54G series (several other brands are compatible as well, including 
some 802.11n based routers, with proprietary wireless modules 
unfortunately), would be to do the shaping not at the computer, but at 
your router, based on port (tcp destport 119/nntp outgoing, same thing 
but srcport incoming, on the WAN interface).  That way you could shape 
traffic for all connected computers at once.  At least open-wrt also 
allows individual shaping on every ethernet port and the wireless, if 
desired.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman