How to slow down traffic to certain ports at certain hours

[Sean Nelson]

[I'm posting this question for a female friend. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with her approach but this seems an interesting tech question and I don't know the answer]

OK, so on some days my BF would play certain games into the wee hours ... which is affecting his/our normal life. So I want to discourage him. (Disclaimer: I don't have a problem with him playing games. I just don't want him playing till 3am.)

But I don't want to hurt his feelings or get into a fight ...

We have a router running Merlin. I know the ports his game uses, and the time he should not play. I could block the ports during certain hours using the web UI for firewall. But

(1) Sudden drop on connections would mess up his progress and bring penalty to him in the game (like lockout period for the next a few sessions).

(2) He'd know something is going on. He probably would even look into the router. He's not very computer savvy but he's smart.

So what I want to do is to slow down the traffic to those ports (add delay in response, drop % of packets, etc.) after certain hours of the day, so play is still possible but the experience deteriorates, so he'd be less interested in continuing after finishing the session.

And I suppose this would be via some iptables rules stored in the less obvious JFFS

Ideally, the slowdown could be gradual (e.g. by breaking the time period into smaller intervals with different rules).

But I don't know how to achieve this. I was an engineering major and am capable of e.g. installing Merlin and load existing scripts onto JFFS, etc. but that's about it.

Is this possible? What would the rules look like? Where should I add them?

For example, say I want to slow down the TCP traffic through ports 4002:4004 between 1am and 6am, and UDP traffic through ports 6002:6004 for the same period, what would the rules be?

Thank you!!!

 

[Sean Nelson]

The router is an AC68U, a gift to them from me ;-)

 

[jpclarke]

If you look at FreshJR’s qos script you may be able to schedule something to meet the requirement.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Thanks. I took a quick look, and have 2 questions (forgive me if these have been answered -- pointers are appreciated)--

[1] I only want these bandwidth limitations applied in early morning. How is this done with FreshJR's QoS?
[2] If the lowest class is the only one using the network at the time, would the low limit still be low? I some how had the impression that the "adaptive" way is NOT to strip lower classes when higher classes are not demanding.

Thanks!

 

[jpclarke]

Hi, if the traffic you are interested in is being classified by the built in engine specify the max limit of that classification to be low e.g. 1%.

If you want variable qos rules,simply schedule multiple scripts with the bandwidths you want at the appropriate times.

You will need to play around a bit to get what you need but the FreshJR script gives you everything you need.

You can also specify specific ip addresses or ports, all detailed in the script.

Thanks