Selective Throttling of bandwidth

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Posted by Jarule, 05-24-2007, 10:41 PM
I have a small office and one of the workers seems to spend too much time surfing the net. I thought of blocking his internet access completely, but I don't think that's the best way to do this, since he will think he's being singled out. What I'd like to do instead, is to throttle his computer's net speed so that it comes to a crawl. I know some switches do this, but is there a software solution for this?
Posted by ryan1918, 05-24-2007, 11:04 PM
What os are you running?
Posted by richwest, 05-24-2007, 11:05 PM
Not an answer to your question, but you might wish to reconsider your approach first. That doesn't seem like a very professional attitude, either his work requires an internet connection or it doesn't. If access is essential to his job you won't be doing anybody any favours by slowing it down to a crawl just because you don't want a confrontation. If you think his browsing is not work related and affects his work, a better solution would be to take him aside and discuss it with him. Obviously only you know the specific details here, but I tend to find that such large amounts of casual surfing are often indicative of boredom (not being given enough work to do, or very repetitive/unfulfilling work). It might also be tricky technically for a number of reasons e.g. the size of web pages varies greatly, so attaining a uniform 'slowness' (rather than some pages loading up at relatively normal speed and some being absolutely crippled) would be very difficult, if possible at all. I assume there's also a good chance that he might require web access for some legitimate reason, which would require discrimination between different types of content.
Posted by jmcgon, 05-25-2007, 01:55 AM
I would just install a transparent proxy server with a blocklist that intercepts all traffic. Look at squid with squidguard setup as a transparent proxy server on your firewall. You can block out porn and other unwanted sites easily.

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