Ok guys, i am very sorry if this has been posted many times (i looked in the tutorial section for help with this)
Firstly when it comes to linux, im a

i know a fair bit about networking and stuff, but nothing at the level of what im about to ask, so please bear with me if im being dumb

Also i couldnt find the search button at the top to search for stuff allready posted on the forum

Ok heres my situation
Currently i have a network with 5 computers (for eg) all these run on DHCP and there is a router connected to the internet

Currently the router is, well pretty crap, for eg, while using bittorent, even if the download speed is only 500 kb/s (10 kb/s up) it locks up the router, and no-one in the house can use the internet (its a 1mb connection, 256kb/s up)

Ok, so i would like to set up a computer as a linux router, so what would happen is that would sit between the router and the rest of the network (unfortunetly i dont have a BB modem at the moment, but if this works i can get one)

Ok so now we have router - > linux computer - > network

I need the linux computer to be a DHCP server (sure thats easy )

and it needs some kind of firewall to keep the network safe

Here comes the tricky part though

i would like to reserve a certain amount of bandwidth for 1 computer, so that all the other computers can use the pool of bandwidth thats left, but this 1 computer allways has a dedicated 10 kb/s (for eg) connection to the internet, which the others cannot use up

ok, i think that bits easy enough (if you know how to do it)

Now the tricky bit - i want that pool to be reserved only when the computer is on, when its turned off i would like that reserved bandwidth to go back to being availible to the rest of the network

Also i would like the linux computer to accept VPN connections (but that can be another time when it works)

If there are any guides that cover this, that would be great, i havent been able to find any (that arent either outdated to the max, or are so compicated its like reading french)

(oh and if theres a good one explaining how you install linux properly, that would be cool)

Thanks for any help
Yahooadam

p.s. Im downloading fedora core 4 to do this, and i have a knoppix live CD
pp.s. im a newb with linux, and will play around with knoppix a bit to get to know it

welcome to LQ!!!

well, you definitely want to give the Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control paper a read, specifically the section entitled Queueing Disciplines for Bandwidth Management... then you could tweak a prefabricated script such as The Wonder Shaper to your liking...

another way you could tackle this is by using a proxy server... Squid comes with a feature called Delay Pools which you might want to look into...

as for the thing about changing the rules when the PC is turned-off, that's really easy... you just need a script on the linux box that pings the PC every minute or so and whenever it doesn't get a reply it executes the script which changes the rules (and vice versa)... i remember i participated in a thread here at LQ where something like this was written a long time ago...

just my ...

wow that looks really really complicated

so i dont understand why i would want squidd ATM ....

ill have a look at that other guide when i have 2 hours lol

i read 2 pages but its just like

info
^
^
^
^
My head

Another thing to keep in mind is that its likely not your router that is causing the bandwidth issue. Many BT trackers are under attack and have been under attack for some time. Using any of the less than reputable ones will about 90% of the time result in Denial of Service attacks being hurled at you. This is a known issue if you visit some of the BT forums.

yeh thats very possible

I think its prolly alot more work then i thought to do this

i might just get a good linksys router instead of this crappt "BT" one (British telecom)(actually made by 2-wire)

I have a linksys befsx41 and still suffer slow downs. At least I don't get disconnects like I did with my Dlink DI604.

Try to pick your trackers carefully. If you use on ethat doesn't cause slow downs try to remember it. If you want to test to see if it is the tracker and not just BT, Nasa is sharing some fo their high res images on BT now (do a google search for Nasa images torrent and you should come across it.) They have some images that'll take about 15 minutes with BT and that should tell you. I was getting 280KB/sec with no slow downs there, yet on unreputable trackers I'd get 50k, and couldn't use the internet on any other machine.