Use windows box as a router?

[d1ck]

Hi, I've got a problem. I'm staying in a residence at a University and I've got my own internet connection because the university run wireless network blows as******. To help pay for this I've got 2 other people in on the connection with me, one who is my roommate, the other is right below me. Herein lies the problem; my friend right below me constantly has torrents downloading and whenever I'm trying to play Xbox Live (Or any other online game for that matter.) I'm constantly lagging out. So, what I want to do is run the connection through my computer (I already have 2 NIC's.) so that I can control who gets priority when it comes to bandwidth. I don't have a problem with leaving my computer on all the time so that's not an issue for me. Can anyone recommend a good program to do this and maybe give me a bit of help setting it up? Basically I need a program that can be a DHCP server and run Qos.

[rendrag]

windows already can do this, but it's kinda half-functional.

You would have to setup internet connection sharing through XP Pro (home doesn't have that functionality). QoS does exist in XP pro, but not like you think. Based on what I've read on MS's site, the QoS built in doesn't really support what you're trying to do. Technically it does, but in the opposite direction. QoS packet scheduling in XP must be supported by the program. That program must request a higher bandwidth priority. So if Xbox Live or your games don't support packet scheduling, they can't request a higher bandwidth priority.

If you bought a router, their QoS is more like what you want. You want to set bittorrent traffic low by default with all other traffic at a normal (or elevated) level if you so desire, so that instead of your programs requesting higher priority,

[redxii]

I bought a router with QoS (Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT firmware), since there is someone that likes to run a bunch of torrents and use maximum upload and trillions of peers that would normally completely halt traffic even on the LAN for other computers and also unable to even access the router setup page. Setting bittorrent to the lowest simply wasn't enough, so I added that computer's MAC address and now if I want to play online or if I want to download an occasional torrent, it's all about me and everything flies as if there were no other computers on the network.

There are also pre-built software/operating systems such as pfsense that if you can get a spare PC, then you could load it and turn it into a router.

[d1ck]

Yeah, I was also thinking about getting the WRT54GL too. Seems like a good idea, and I could use a decent router. I'll look into it some more and see what I can come up with.

[gamehead200]

Yeah, I was also thinking about getting the WRT54GL too. Seems like a good idea, and I could use a decent router. I'll look into it some more and see what I can come up with.

d1ck, I'm in the same boat as you. I'm in residence as well and I have a few people connected to my wireless connection and have enabled QoS and MAC filtering and all that in my WRT54GL router. Great piece of hardware, along with the Tomato firmware.