A way to prioritize/shape traffic on LAN?

I have a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router running Tomato v1.24 firmware. Behind that router, I have a desktop running Win7 Ultimate and a number of laptops running XP, Vista, and various Linux distros.

I use the desktop mainly as a storage box/file server, but it's also a media server and torrent box as well as general browser/email use. When moving files around between computers, especially when I have torrents running, everything slows to a crawl on all the computers connected to my AP and moving a few GB of files from a lappy to the desktop can take hours.

I want to prioritize the traffic on my LAN so that file transfers between computers take priority over, say, torrents, but not necessarily over browsing or email.

I've searched the Google, but I'm mainly coming up with a bunch of articles from pre-2005 that seem to be pitching a vertain brand of router more than explaining how to prioritize your network traffic.

I've looked into QoS, but from what I've read, that's more for shaping traffic to/from the internet, not necessarily local traffic.

Is there a way, short of getting another Linux box to act as a router/firewall or dedicated server, to prioritize my local traffic over stuff coming in from outside?

jwalk said:

I have a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router running Tomato v1.24 firmware. Behind that router, I have a desktop running Win7 Ultimate and a number of laptops running XP, Vista, and various Linux distros.

I use the desktop mainly as a storage box/file server, but it's also a media server and torrent box as well as general browser/email use. When moving files around between computers, especially when I have torrents running, everything slows to a crawl on all the computers connected to my AP and moving a few GB of files from a lappy to the desktop can take hours.

I want to prioritize the traffic on my LAN so that file transfers between computers take priority over, say, torrents, but not necessarily over browsing or email.

I've searched the Google, but I'm mainly coming up with a bunch of articles from pre-2005 that seem to be pitching a vertain brand of router more than explaining how to prioritize your network traffic.

I've looked into QoS, but from what I've read, that's more for shaping traffic to/from the internet, not necessarily local traffic.

Is there a way, short of getting another Linux box to act as a router/firewall or dedicated server, to prioritize my local traffic over stuff coming in from outside?

Hi and welcome

Are you using "homegroup" for networking? Homegroup is for win 7 only networks. Since you have at least Linux, win 7, and vists/xp, yoou should be using workgroup

About throttling. there are several good apps (net limiter) but they are a fixed number I suspect you want the nu,ber to rise and fall with the speed of the network and the apps running. Havent seen it

Ken

One of the laptops is dual-booting Seven and Ubuntu. I do have the homegroup enabled so when the lappy is booted into 7, I can use the play-to feature to stream media to our bedroom while we sleep.

Aside from that, I do have regular workgroup file/printer sharing enabled and configured.

I suppose I could have been more clear in what I was asking. Let me try again: On my desktop, say I have torrents running and they're going as fast as my internet connection allows and there's a couple thousand connections being used. If there's something on a laptop that needs to be moved to or from the desktop, I'd like that traffic to be given priority over anything else so that the file transfer completes as soon as possible.

From what I've read, I'll have to do as you say and rely on a third-party app. I do have an old P2 400MHz box laying around somewhere I could install a Linux firewall distro on and use whatever features there are to accomplish the task, but all the headache in setting something like that up isn't something I'd look forward to.