Can excessive Peer to Peer downloads break your router?

[Emn1ty]

Peer to Peer is a tool for me to replace lost software (legally). Now that this has been established, I will say my torrents are probably once every month, if not maybe three in a year at max. But ever since my brother in law returned to the house he has done less than so, but far more often. My curiosity comes to what will happen to my router and or internet connection if he continues doing said downloading. He currently downloads five to six torrents at a time. The result is near dial up internet speeds for my browsers and a useless XBL connection. What's worse is after doing several speed tests I fear my ISP may be starting to throttle our internet. Currently we have Road Runner and I don't know if they have a history of doing so when excessive amounts of peer to peer downloading is detected. Any advice as to what I could possibly due to avoid any possible problems?

[SuperHumanly]

It won't break the router, no, but yes your ISP could throttle you for downloading too much, especially with torrents.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Ask him politely to not p2p so much. Or ask him to set his settings to not consume so much bandwidth.

It will not 'break' your router, though many home use routers have a limited capacity, and may need to be reset just because they get overloaded with connections.

But when it comes to your guests, they ought to realize that they use your internet connection under your terms.

[Emn1ty]

I've asked him to stop before and he has. It wasn't until today that I had to ask him three times and he stopped listening to me. He's one of those guys who downloads without knowing the consequences of doing it the wrong way or just plain too much.

[+Xinok Subscriber²]

Enable encryption. In uTorrent, open Preferences -> Bittorrent, set Outgoing to "Forced" and Uncheck "Allow incoming legacy connections".

Try lowering the max number of connections allowed. Preferences -> Bandwidth, lower the value of "Global maximum number of connections". I have mine set to 100 connections max, and I still get very fast speeds without slowing down the internet.

uTorrent has the scheduler, so you can configure it to use less bandwidth during the day.

Final solution: If he doesn't listen to you, block his MAC address on the router.

[Emn1ty]

  Xinok said:

Final solution: If he doesn't listen to you, block his MAC address on the router.

I would totally do this if he wasn't a weapon specialist in the Army... my nerdy arms can't repel power of that magnitude!

[+Xinok Subscriber²]

  Emn1ty said:

I would totally do this if he wasn't a weapon specialist in the Army... my nerdy arms can't repel power of that magnitude!

Send him a fake email from RIAA.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-95600.html

Well, you can't use that one since it would most likely be blocked by the spam filter. Perhaps you could print it out, put it in an envelope and mail it to him. :p

[GreenMartian]

  Xinok said:

Send him a fake email from RIAA.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-95600.html

Well, you can't use that one since it would most likely be blocked by the spam filter. Perhaps you could print it out, put it in an envelope and mail it to him. :p

Or wait till you get a real one. All the downloading are traceable to your house :p

What router do you have? There are ways to slow down specific traffic to specific IP addresses in the network. Maybe instead of blocking his MAC, you can deploy QOS against it and slow his torrent downloading. You can always claim ignorance and say it might be the ISP throttling his downloads :D

Hope he doesn't visit Neowin..

[+BudMan MVC]

"Or wait till you get a real one. All the downloading are traceable to your house"

Don't scare people with stuff like that without giving all the details required for that to happen.. Like a court order to your ISP, and or an ISP that has no respect for the privacy of its users. And then downoading something from a tracker or bogus tracker that someone is watching, etc.

You don't just download one questionable torrent -- and the software police coming knocking on your door.. Is it possible he could get a letter/email -- sure its possible. But it's a bit more involved than your statement might lead a user to believe.

As already mentioned.. No torrents will not break your router -- could it temp overload it and require a reset, sure depends on the router in question and the amount of connections, etc.

But its quite possible to let him download as much as he wants without causing you pain with your browsing. The easy method is to just correctly setup his torrent client. Its not really related to the number of connections, but the amount of upload bandwidth you allow him to use -- this is the biggest factor in causing slow internet for browsing. When the upload pipe is full, you can not query dns, you can not request the page, etc. And you can not ack back, etc. So everything comes to a crawl.

On his p2p client adjust the upload to say max 80% of your upload pipe. This will leave room for other traffic, web, dns, etc. Since its rare that p2p actually uses up the full download pipe -- most people have much larger download than upload. But if your upload is full you can not do much of anything else.

I just had 5 active torrents running last night (screaming speeds -- over 1.5MB/sec combined across the 5), and never noticed -- since I have my client setup correctly.

So use a tool like speedtest.net to test what your upload speed is, then set his client to only use say 70 to 80% of that, and you'll much better browsing, etc.

Other option as mentioned - is if your router supports QoS, is to set http, dns, and whatever other protocols you need to higher priority -- so that they will basically cut in line on your router even though p2p is using up all the upload bandwidth.

[carmatic]

my experience with QOS was that they never seemed to work... then again it could be that i have been using routers which didnt implement it properly...

[offroadaaron]

  carmatic said:

my experience with QOS was that they never seemed to work... then again it could be that i have been using routers which didnt implement it properly...

Thats because QoS is for upload only on the users end, I'd explain it but it'd be better if you just do a google search on it.

[Nagisan]

I personally have never experienced any throttling from Roadrunner, but it depends where you draw the line for excessive downloading vs reasonable amounts. The best you can do is properly configure his torrent client settings for him and ask him not to change them. As mentioned above, utorrent also has a scheduling system, you can enable a "limited" mode during the day that only allows him to use up to half or so of your connection speed (maybe less, depending on your connection). Then allow it to go full speed at night when no one else is using it.

If configured properly, you will be almost unable to tell that someone is downloading on the network by simply browsing the internet......I can download 5-6 things at once with a proper configuration and still get near-full speed tests on any computer in my network. I can even go as far as being able to game, I get roughly twice the ping while gaming, but its still doable.

[DjmUK]

Pull out the modem connection - say the Internet is down, and when he's gone, put it back up. If he notices, say, the Internet is intermittent :D

Or be a man and put him straight - "STOP using my Internet for il-legal activities, STOP using up all my bandwidth, this is my Internet service and you are the guest".

[carmatic]

  offroadaaron said:

Thats because QoS is for upload only on the users end, I'd explain it but it'd be better if you just do a google search on it.

which is what i have configured it as, putting all outbound traffic on the ports used for my P2P to have low priority relative to everything else, and yet they still tie up my upload bandwidth...

[+BudMan MVC]

"on the ports used for my P2P to have low priority"

How did you set that? By the source port of the traffic? Because the destination port is going to be all over the map.

Your client is going to upload traffic to them on the port they have set in their client. So see it all the time misconfigured qos that won't do much of anything.

Its more than likely easier to just set stuff you want to use on the destination port to be high priority - and leave p2p in the bulk/standard queue. Ie http (80), dns (53), etc.

But to be honest, if the clients are correctly setup there is no need for QoS -- im running 2 big torrents right now, and I don't even notice it since the client is limited on its upload settings.

[Nagisan]

  BudMan said:

But to be honest, if the clients are correctly setup there is no need for QoS -- im running 2 big torrents right now, and I don't even notice it since the client is limited on its upload settings.

+1, I say put the maximum upload to 80% of your actual upload (not just your advertised, do some tests when no one is active on your network and get an average to work with), then on top of that you can use a client like the newer utorrent (2.0+) which can auto-limit and dynamically lower maximum upload speeds depending on current traffic. It does this by getting an average ping from a location (not sure exactly where) and then trying to keep that ping under 100 while allowing you to upload. If ping goes over 100, upload limit is decreased, if ping is under 100, upload is increased up to a set maximum (based off your actual internet speed).

Beyond that though you still need to be wary of downloads. Typically the speed is not the issue, but the general connections is the issue. You can limit your upload speed and still have horrible browsing speed because the torrent client is connecting to too many connections. As an example, the max downloads I can run simultaneously on a 10Mbit / 512Kbit connection as suggested by utorrent, is 4 active torrents with 3 active downloads (what its means is a max of 4 torrents, 1 is reserved for uploading unless you change the second value). Then, my max number of connections is at 350, with a max of 85 per torrent.

I can manually change these settings to allow for more connections or more active torrents, and I have found that doing so can boost my download speeds (if downloading under my max bandwidth, upping the connections means more clients are connected to me which means more data coming to my computer), but at the same time even with limiting my upload speed, too many total connections completely kills my network.

[Xilo]

Just be an ass and turn on QoS and limit his bandwidth and change his BT settings.

[ShamRocker1]

  BudMan said:

"Or wait till you get a real one. All the downloading are traceable to your house"

Don't scare people with stuff like that without giving all the details required for that to happen.. Like a court order to your ISP, and or an ISP that has no respect for the privacy of its users. And then downoading something from a tracker or bogus tracker that someone is watching, etc.

You don't just download one questionable torrent -- and the software police coming knocking on your door.. Is it possible he could get a letter/email -- sure its possible. But it's a bit more involved than your statement might lead a user to believe.

As already mentioned.. No torrents will not break your router -- could it temp overload it and require a reset, sure depends on the router in question and the amount of connections, etc.

But its quite possible to let him download as much as he wants without causing you pain with your browsing. The easy method is to just correctly setup his torrent client. Its not really related to the number of connections, but the amount of upload bandwidth you allow him to use -- this is the biggest factor in causing slow internet for browsing. When the upload pipe is full, you can not query dns, you can not request the page, etc. And you can not ack back, etc. So everything comes to a crawl.

On his p2p client adjust the upload to say max 80% of your upload pipe. This will leave room for other traffic, web, dns, etc. Since its rare that p2p actually uses up the full download pipe -- most people have much larger download than upload. But if your upload is full you can not do much of anything else.

I just had 5 active torrents running last night (screaming speeds -- over 1.5MB/sec combined across the 5), and never noticed -- since I have my client setup correctly.

So use a tool like speedtest.net to test what your upload speed is, then set his client to only use say 70 to 80% of that, and you'll much better browsing, etc.

Other option as mentioned - is if your router supports QoS, is to set http, dns, and whatever other protocols you need to higher priority -- so that they will basically cut in line on your router even though p2p is using up all the upload bandwidth.

I get letters all the time from the RIAA/MPAA at the uni I work for. They're pretty accurate in their descriptions (file name, IP addy, etc.).

[GreenMartian]

Oh, and as far as QoS go, I use Tomato firmware and it has inbound & outbound rate limiting in the QoS section. :)

I suggested doing stuff in the router level as he might not have the courage to touch his brother-in-law's computer to change the settings in his torrent client.

[offroadaaron]

  Xilo said:

Just be an ass and turn on QoS and limit his bandwidth and change his BT settings.

We just explained this.

  GreenMartian said:

Oh, and as far as QoS go, I use Tomato firmware and it has inbound & outbound rate limiting in the QoS section. :)

That actually isn't QoS, but will obviously work.

[+BudMan MVC]

"at the uni I work for."

Well your uni has clearly given them your info then. Nice to see your uni is all about personal privacy there.. But on the other hand - evey uni I have ever been at or read the rules for clearly states in their rules to use their network that downloading or sharing of copyrighted material is a no no!

If you break their rules for their network thats on you.. its pretty simple if you have access to the tracker, run it or deal with the people that do to get file name and IP info.. The trick is putting that IP to a name -- that has to come from the owner of the network it came from.. Be it a school or an isp.. A decent one would not give out this info without a court order, etc.

There are plenty of articles about how to spot fake trackers and torrents. Read the comments on the torrents for starters ;) Use a good search site that removes the fake trackers for another, etc.

BTW -- I have to ask, WTF would you be downloading illegal torrents from your place of work for?? That's just asking to get either fired or in trouble with the software police.

[Emn1ty]

I figured it out. He apparently didn't know the program had to be completely shut down. He would stop the individual torrents but leave the software running. Turning it off fixes the problem entirely.

[offroadaaron]

OMG LOL

[LiquidSolstice]

Somehow I doubt there is any friend at all in this sitation. Neowin is full of people who think of some cover story or another to aid them with issues brought about by P2P and piracy, cover stories which somehow paint them as the victim or in a better light.

Sad.

[toadeater]

  LiquidSolstice said:

Somehow I doubt there is any friend at all in this sitation. Neowin is full of people who think of some cover story or another to aid them with issues brought about by P2P and piracy, cover stories which somehow paint them as the victim or in a better light.

Sad.

I too am shocked. These pirates are the scum of the Earth! They should all be rounded up and made to walk the plank, or trampled by elephants, or shot out of cannons, or thrown in alligator pits--whatever they used to do to pirates when they caught them.