Be Excellent To Each Other

I seem to remember that someone here had a router setup that automatically throttled his (or her) torrent port when there was HTTP activity.
How's that done, then? If someone can just tell me what to Google for, that would be a good start.

Sheepeh, I think. He's using the open source DD-WRT router firmware, which runs on a stack of commodity routers, notably Netgears. It's the QoS support you want (as in Quality of Service). Can be set to prioritise traffic via protocol or port.

Edit -- or perhaps not DD-WRT, perhaps Tomato.

I think it's QoS.

//edit: Balls to you, Dick Gaywood

You snooze, you lose.

Hmmm, what's this about then? Is it a security issue?

No, it's just to avoid your web browsing dropping to a crawl if you've got torrents running. Changing priorities, basically.

No. I just don't want to have to turn my torrents off every time I want to play me some Xbox.

Gah. So not looking forward to flashing my router with third-party firmware.

Wait - spare router FTW!

Have you checked your current one for QoS? It's not a particularly 'advanced' feature.

No commodity router has anything like the support Tomato does. All I've ever seen in most home routers is support for IEE-(SUB PLEASE INSERT), which is where your VOIP traffic meekly says "hey can I be high priority please" and the router respects it. Tomato can force priorities on traffic, chose via a wide range of alternatives.

Indeed, but if what's there by default meets the requirement well enough, why bother with the custom firmware?

Because the default gubbins won't slow torrents to accomodate gaming.

EVE - HIGH!
XBOX- HIGH!
BROWSING - HIGH!
TORRENTS - MEDIUM!
MY NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR WHO CHECK HER EMAIL ONCE A WEEK AND LETS ME USE HER PARKING SPACE FOR THE PRIVILEGE: LOW!

I'm after a new router too, my old 3com one is getting decidedly flaky on the wifi side of things.
What's a good choice, I like the sounds of this custom firmware malarkey but not if it's going to involve days of buggering about with obscure unix commands to get it to work.. So maybe just one that works well by default might be nice.

I've been offered an old BT Home hub but that *has* to be hacked to even work with a non BT ISP and frankly it looks a bit sketchy.

Ah, yes, I meant router with wifi and ADSL modem. Give me model numbers, people!

Bah. My rubbish Sky-provided Netgear DG834GT doesn't have anything like QoS

Oh, didn't realise you were on Sky. My DG934 doesn't do any of that either. You know changing the Sky router is uniquely painful?

And against the ToS, impressively.
There are ways to get your Sky info via URL injection, however...

I don't think these work on the newer DG934 I have. Didn't seem to when I tried just now.

You're downloading the netgear.cfg file to see the results?

And there's no need - you can telnet into yours.

Yes. I get an error when I try to access it.

Oh? I haven't had any need to look into hacking it. I know no-one had figured it out when I first got it, six months ago.