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I am administrator of the network in my house. There are lot of tenants watching audio/video streaming (for example: TVUPlayer). This creates problem to other users in the network resulting in lower speed and frequent packet drops. Could you let me know how to permanently block users from such streaming ?

joe
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4 Answers4

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The problem is that many different sites use different methods of video streaming. Some even use HTTP to do it. It will be very difficult if not impossible to implement this for all sites.

You may have better luck implementing bandwidth restrictions per ip address. It's possible if you use a Cisco router/firewall. Basically, you'd use access lists similar to this:

access-list 101 permit ip any 10.10.10.7 255.255.255.255

class-map match-any RESTRICTED description This Server Info match access-group 101

policy-map BANDWIDTH-RESTRICTED class RESTRICTED police 1000000 10000 exceed-action drop

int f0 service-policy output BANDWIDTH-RESTRICTED

You'd have to create one for each ip (the ips can be dhcp or static) and you'd modify the bandwidth allowed and interface applied to as necessary.

tselliott
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What kind of router is it?

See if you can throttle certain types of traffic with QoS.

mand0
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That would depend a lot on the router/firewall, and on how the video is streaming, and where the video is streaming from.

If the video is within the network then you would need a managed switch to control the type of traffic flow.

If the video is external and uses a dedicated protocol then you can block all traffic using that protocol using a firewall.

Otherwise how about blocking the sites that are streaming the video?

The best solution here would be to use QoS and traffic shaping to still allow the video, but grant other traffic types a higher priority.

Most home routers have some QoS/Firewall functionality to enable the above.

Alex
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  • Except for managing internal traffic. The switch in a home router won't be managed. – Alex Nov 15 '09 at 03:20
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This answer makes a few assumptions:

1 - Your router is using DHCP to administer IP address allocation and host TCP/IP config for all the clients.

2 - Your tenants understand that you're in charge of the network, and that if you change things, they either deal with the changes or are on their own for bandwidth.

Use OpenDNS as your DNS provider, configured on the router. You can set up a free account with them, that you can then use to filter:

  • specific sites
  • sites by category
  • IP addresses.

Traffic to those sites will result in an 'Error Page' that you can customize, so that your tenants know to talk to you about their inability to stream, rather than Google "openDNS".

For best effect, I'd also recommend that you disallow DNS traffic through the router to other resolvers, essentially forcing all clients to relay DNS requests to the servers you've chosen.

Keep in mind that implementing a 'no streaming' policy such as this may result in less tenants, and possibly less rental income. Or, it may result in requests to install additional broadband connections to specific rooms, which of course you can deal with using your own judgement... :)

George Erhard
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