Mac Address Priority

[Peegee]

I thought this was sufficient but apparently not.

I want to set up one pc to download incessantly without lagging the entire home network. So I set up mac priority in my router (Linksys WRH54G)

Doesn't work - I'm lagged to no end and can't even play video games. So I put every stupid computer in my network except for my own on mac address priority lower than my computers.

Same deal.

I even tried changing the ethernet port priority but I think that only affects intranet traffic.

I asked my friend who told me that while he's not familiar with linksys routers, that mac address priority should do what I want. Am I missing something or not even looking in the right direction?

[NeoTifa]

It's a mac. Take a hammer to it.

[Balzac]

Looooooooool

[o_O]

Linksys routers aren't known for being able to use QoS or throttling very well. In my experience, trying to enable QoS on my WAG54g (closed source firmware) has only slowed stuff down, and I found that if I tried to run a torrent client on any machine on my network that it would kill the bandwidth to all other client machines even if the inbound traffic was well under my connection speed. Linksys routers are also known for collapsing under a lot of incoming connections (this is common with bittorrent), so that could be something to consider.

I've never used an open source firmware on my router but I've heard that decent ones are meant to alleviate this a bit, but still not really that well. Something else that could work is to try installing a level 7 packet filter to your router. That's similar to the type of throttling performed by ISPs. I dunno, maybe I'm just missing the plot, but this is what I used to tell people when I worked in support for an ISP. :p

[Peegee]

Just for fun and for later, what router(s) would you recommend that could be a (n expensive) solution for my issue?

[Samuraid]

Have you considered running DD-WRT on the router? You may have better luck with it (plus it beats the default Linksys firmware by a long shot.)

[o_O]

Just for fun and for later, what router(s) would you recommend that could be a (n expensive) solution for my issue?
To be honest, since I quit working in network support I'm totally out of the loop as far as routers go. You'd be much better off listening to Google or someone else on here who's more up to date.

Have you considered running DD-WRT on the router? You may have better luck with it (plus it beats the default Linksys firmware by a long shot.)
I think that's what he's running now. :p

[NeoTifa]

My advice is better.

[Peegee]

My advice is better.

it's not a mac.

oh wait it was a joke

I wish the best of sars to you.

[o_O]

OSX is a better operating system than Windows.

[Peegee]

OSX is a better operating system than Windows.

Windows 7 > OSX?

either way, probably, but I have anti apple product bias.

[o_O]

Fair enough, and they brought it upon themselves with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPod Touch. And every other iThing.

I'm set in my ways and Microsoft is a bunch of corporate whores. Windows 7 is nice though. :p

[crono_logical]

The reason P2P usually lags people's connections is because it's saturating your upload, not download bandwidth :p You'll find limiting your upload speed in the P2P app to 50-80% of your real upload speed does well most of the time :p

Or you can go overkill like me, stick a linux box between the LAN and the internet connection so forcing everything through, then prioritise outbound traffic depending on the size of the packets themselves whilst making sure the upload is never saturated - let small packets out before big ones, since they're usually handshakes or requests for data so lowering their latency improves the perceived speed greatly :D I use other tweaks too when prioritising the traffic, but sorting on packet size seems to give the best improvement :p