[angelmb]

Being LAN the minimum expression you can think about… two or exceptionally three Macs, no more, no less. I would like to limit the amount of bandwidth usage for any of them, ideally one of them could get as much as needed while the remaining ones could only get something like 50% of the available bandwidth.

I have no idea where to start so any advice would be indeed welcomed.

[larkost]

The phrase you are looking for is "traffic shaping". And this is not always an easy thing to get right.

[besson3c]

Squid is the only Unix service I know of that will throttle bandwidth.

[mduell]

Do you want to limit each computer's traffic to/from the internet, or each computer's traffic internally on the LAN?

[angelmb]

larkost, thanks for point me to the precise word, english is not my first language and having to deal with specific jargon just make it worse

besson3c, Squidman is the only thing slightly 'squid-wise' related I was able to find @ macupdate, but I don't think it could be what I am looking for… take that asseveration with a grain of salt since I am a plain moron when it becomes to net-anything…

mark, to limit a certain computer's traffic from the internet was indeed my real purpose

[mduell]

The next question is do you really want to limit 2 computers to a certain speed, or do you just want to make sure that one computer always gets priority? Those are two different problems, with two different solutions.

[ghporter]

Time for my quarterly "why do people post questions about networking anywhere but the Networking forum" rant. This is the fourth thread in the last day or so that started out in the wrong place (so this isn't a knock specifically at you, angelmb). Moving...

On the subject at hand, there are hardware devices that'll let you do either of the two approaches mduell is talking about-but they tend to be expensive. There are combination hardware/firmware solutions that are far less expensive, but be prepared to do some work managing the thing.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by angelmb 

besson3c, Squidman is the only thing slightly 'squid-wise' related I was able to find @ macupdate, but I don't think it could be what I am looking for… take that asseveration with a grain of salt since I am a plain moron when it becomes to net-anything…

Here is info on Squid:

squid : Optimising Web Delivery

You can compile it using Macports.

I don't want to overwhelm you with too much detail about all of this, because I'm not certain if this is what you are looking for. Take a look at the site and let us know what you think!

[angelmb]

My apologies Glenn, I know how it goes… it is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. But I think I have to do it, I guess I was so 'blind' looking for a built-in way to do this that I went straight to Mac OS X board asking for help missing the point that there is a whole networking board -no wonder I didn't find the topic @ Mac OS X board today-

Well, I think it would be kind of one of the Macs getting priority, I mean, if all of them are active and connected to the internet one gets priority and the rest get only a certain amount of bandwidth percentage. As that 'main' Mac is not connected the remaining ones could eat as much bandwidth as they want… not sure if bad wording on my behalf remains.

I guess I thought that could be achieve via plain software… so far I don't want to look for any hardware related solution.

Thanks all anyway