Shared internet troubles.

[thrila]

I live with a house of 5 people and we share the internet.  Basically after 2 years of no internet i paid for it to be installed and pay the bills for it ( my housemates pay me their share).  I more or less got the internet so i could play AH and other online games.  After 2 years internet cold turkey i just couldn't and went out and got it.  

Well, the problem is this- it is unplayable as of late.  I cannot play online games because  within the last couple of months have been getting massive variations in ping 100-800ms and lately heavy warp.  During one attempt at team fortress 2 when the warp was horrid I went to the prime suspect's room (yeah i probably shouldn't have if i had any morals) and looked at his laptop.  He had limewire open and was downloading porn.  

I've asked him if he does large d/ls or has any p2p programs installed, which he denies.  How exactly do i go about proving him wrong, without it being known that i went into his room and rumaged through his latop?  When i got the internet i made it clear that d/ls were to only happen during the day or overnight when i'm not playing online- which was the primary reason for the net in the first place.

I hate to be an arse, but i'm considering changing the password to the wireless router and not giving it to him.  Any suggestions how i can force him to admit that i know it's him ruiing the internet for the rest of the house (other housemates play online too).

[AquaShrimp]

To avoid a bunch of problems, you need a way to limit the bandwidth to your mates.  Is there a program that will allow you to do this?

[WilldCrd]

Skuzzy will now more about this but i do believe most routers have a option to show in the log how many packets someone is sending/receiving and how much activity is going on.
you wont pove WHAT he was doing but you can prove how much he was doing.
you should also be able to restrict how much he can do at certain times like blocking sites at limewire during certain hours

[forHIM]

Depending on the router/firewall, you could block in/out ports for those p2p services.  It won't take them long to find a new port, but it may help short term.

[WMLute]

Originally posted by thrila
I live with a house of 5 people and we share the internet.  Basically after 2 years of no internet i paid for it to be installed and pay the bills for it ( my housemates pay me their share).  I more or less got the internet so i could play AH and other online games.  After 2 years internet cold turkey i just couldn't and went out and got it.  

Well, the problem is this- it is unplayable as of late.  I cannot play online games because  within the last couple of months have been getting massive variations in ping 100-800ms and lately heavy warp.  During one attempt at team fortress 2 when the warp was horrid I went to the prime suspect's room (yeah i probably shouldn't have if i had any morals) and looked at his laptop.  He had limewire open and was downloading porn.  

I've asked him if he does large d/ls or has any p2p programs installed, which he denies.  How exactly do i go about proving him wrong, without it being known that i went into his room and rumaged through his latop?  When i got the internet i made it clear that d/ls were to only happen during the day or overnight when i'm not playing online- which was the primary reason for the net in the first place.

I hate to be an arse, but i'm considering changing the password to the wireless router and not giving it to him.  Any suggestions how i can force him to admit that i know it's him ruiing the internet for the rest of the house (other housemates play online too).

You are not being the arse, the roomate lying to you is being an arse.  It would be THEIR fault not yours.

Do what you suggested and just change the password OR block his mac address (might be easier as roomates can always give out passwords).

This doesn't have to be perminent, but I would be hard pressed to ever trust the guy after he flat out lied to you about something so small and stupid.  

You had some very simple rules and if they didn't want to follow them and loose their internet priv's. that's not your fault.

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by thrila
I hate to be an arse, but i'm considering changing the password to the wireless router and not giving it to him.  Any suggestions how i can force him to admit that i know it's him ruiing the internet for the rest of the house (other housemates play online too).

How much ya wanna spend?

[WMLute]

Originally posted by Vulcan
How much ya wanna spend?

No need to pay anything.

Do a bandwidth check as he is d/l porn.

Block his mac address in the router.

Do a bandwidth check w/ him blocked.

Takes 2min.

(edit: you could even have another roomate or THAT roomate in the room with you when ya' do it)

[ROC]

If they are all paying you what you describe as "their fair share" then you have no control.  If you didn't specify limits to begin with, then they all gain access as they see fit.

I'd be very careful getting into their system as you are not allowed to go there.  Simply providing access to them, and collecting a fee for it, does not give you rights to their computer, you are making a mistake here.

If you want control over your bandwidth completely, then you need to disable their access across the board, once their fair share of funding is paid out, then re-enable them with limits, in writing, being very specific about the times they can or cannot operate.  It's one thing to say you were very clear, it's something altogether different to state "Sign Here"

Just friendly advice, going off your own words and description of the situation.

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by WMLute
No need to pay anything.

Do a bandwidth check as he is d/l porn.

Block his mac address in the router.

Do a bandwidth check w/ him blocked.

Takes 2min.

(edit: you could even have another roomate or THAT roomate in the room with you when ya' do it)

Block mac addresses doesn't help much.

I was thinking more along the most extreme case of using a Layer7 box to prevent P2P traffic entirely.

[eagl]

Originally posted by thrila
How exactly do i go about proving him wrong, without it being known that i went into his room and rumaged through his latop?

Reset the router every 20 min and listen to who screams.  Ask him why he's so uptight all the time.

Then again, if the guy is a lying sack of crap, talk to your ISP about getting a second IP address just for yourself.  I know that you can do this with roadrunner (time warner cable) for an extra $10 or so a month.  Plug in the second cable modem and lock it down for yourself.  If anyone asks why you're doing that, tell them that you ran a network monitoring program and *someone* in the house was downloading porn and sharing illegal music, and you don't want to get sued along with everyone else.  If anyone asks for proof or for more details, tell them with a straight face that you charge for those kind of services but don't want to risk taking business from someone who might get sued for illegal activities, so sorry.

[thrila]

I'l look into the suggestions guys, thanks.  I'll look into limiting bandwidth etc.   It's unlikely the other housemates will give him the new password if i change it, they have been complaining of having to hit refresh several times just to get web pages to load.  How much would a layer7 box cost, vulcan?

The internet is a very informal afair in my house.  They don't even pay me per se, rather buy me a couple pints at the local every month.  ROC, i don't see the need for writing, they know why i got the net.   When i got it i let them know if they wanted to have access, they could buy a router.  I made it very clear that downloading large files etc wasn't to happen during the evening because that's when it would be likely i'd play games.  


It's just very frustrating coming home and wanting to unwind by playing games, but being unable to.  I don't have much time to play, i've logged few hours for the past couple of months, so when i have time, i want to be able to!  It's just got the the point where i can't take it anymore.

[eagl]

If you turn off UPnP on the router, it can mess up some P2P programs and force them to use manual ports.  Then you can figure out what the usual ports are that limewire uses them, and shut them off or route them to a bogus IP address.

If you want to know what ports his computer uses, get nmap.  There should still be a windows version out there somewhere if you don't have a linux box.  Portscan his computer and see what ports are in use.  Then set up router rules to forward weird ports he's using to 10.10.10.10 or something equally random.

If network performance improves, but then he finds workarounds to get his porn fix, that is pretty much grounds in my mind to block his MAC address which should work against 99% of stupid lying porn addict rat finks.  If he figures out how to spoof or change his MAC address, then change the network password or do whatever is necessary to ban him from the network.

[eagl]

If you were really mean, you could also set up another computer hard-wired to the router that does nothing but flood his computer with network traffic.  Nmap has a "feature" that will let a computer pump out bogus connect requests about as fast as your network card's buffer can throw them out, and I'm sure there are other less legitimate "utilities" out there that will do the same thing.  Just don't go looking for hacker tools 'cause you'll end up with a virus.  Try to find legit network security tools that also happen to have security testing features that let you mess with individual ports on individual computers.  All in the name of network security of course, since you "own" the network right?

Of course, if everyone is on wireless, then you won't be able to simply saturate his connection so you'd have to be more sneaky, like using a lower packet rate but just send borked connection requests.  I don't know the protocols well enough to do it without reading a lot of documentation, but the nmap help files are rather thorough.

[SD67]

I like eagles solution, most p2p clients running over a non UPnP network need to have the ports forwarded to them so they shouldn't be hard to find, especially if only you have admin rights over the router since they will have to come to you to get their ports forwarded in the first place.
You can also disable UDP routing to the offending computers before you start AHII and enable them after you finish too. That way when people find they cannot connect to a server while you're playing they assume it's your system hogging the bandwidth once they realise they can hook back up again after you finish it will become reinforced. This only works if they are not tech savvy though.
Even if they are and you get questioned about it, you can just state that some folk have been abusing the D/L privileges and you simply set the system up so you get priority when you play. Your connection, your rules.

[FBplmmr]