Anyone used the bandwidth management on Zyxel 660H?

I have a Zyxel 660H ADSL router which has performed just about
flawlessly for the six months that I've had it.

I want to try and use the Bandwidth Management facilities to prevent
BitTorrent from hogging all the bandwidth but at present I can't quite
get my mind round the best way to do this. The descriptions and
examples in the manual don't really seem to apply to this sort of
requirement and, also, don't seem to be quite correct for the 660H
anyway.

Does anyone have any experience of doing this and/or are there any web
pages anywhere that might help. There's nothing more than what's in
the manual on the Zyxel web site.

 

[snip]

I don't have experience with the particular router, but I've used Linux to
do the same thing. Looking at the manual the principles appear basically the
same, although I see no way to order classification rules or set a default
class which restricts what you can do somewhat.

Can you elaborate on how the descriptions and examples "don't seem to be
quite correct" for your router?

Alex

 

I can only set one 'layer' of child classes below the root LAN and WAN
classes. If I try and create a child of a child (that is a
grand-child of one of the root classes) I get an error message.
All the manual descriptions and examples show multiple layers of child
classes and even talk about grandchild/grandparent.

To prevent BitTorrent from hogging the bandwidth it would seem to me
that what I want to do is:-

Create a BitTorrent child class which has a bandwidth allocation
of, say, 256kb/s (a quarter of my 1Mb/s ADSL).

Create grand-child classes, one for each BitTorrent port which can
share the BitTorrent 256kb/s allocated to their parent.

Since I can't create grandchildren I don't appear to be able to do it
this way.

The whole bandwidth management things seems a bit limited compared
with the firewall set-up. There are only a few 'ready made' traffic
types and they seem a rather odd mix -
VOIP
Web
FTP
E-Mail
Video
there is also no explanation of what they mean, does E-Mail include
POP3, SMTP and IMAP or what?

Also in the Class Configuration it's not at all clear how the IP
Address, subnet mask and port are used. If you specify a complete IP
address why would you specify a subnet mask as well? Can you specify
*just* a source or destination? It's also a pity that you can't
specify a range of ports as you can in the firewall set-up.

 

Sorry if I've got the wrong end of the stick, but why not just set a max
upload and download speed limit from within your BitTorrent client?

 

What error? Is the bandwidth filter active on the class you are trying to
create a child of?

[snip]

Given what the manual suggests is possible, I think this is the most
practical solution.

A good question. (But not one I can answer, unfortunately.)

I would expect that the source or destination address is a match if it is in
the range of addresses described by the corresponding address/mask pair. For
example, if you wanted to match the single address 192.168.1.123, you would
use 192.168.1.123/255.255.255.255; if you wanted to match 192.168.1.*, you
would use 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0.

Yes, that is another omission.

Alex

 

For a number of reasons (though it may be a possibility still) :-

I didn't know you could! (Also it's only in the latest versions
isn't it?)

It's not 'my' machine running BitTorrent, though it is in the
family.

Ideally I'd like to control the priority of BitTorrent rather than
its absolute bandwidth usage, if nothing else is going on it can
have all the bandwidth for all I care.

 

I can only assume that you're just on about using BitTorrent as
downloaded from http://www.bittorrent.com/ rather than one of the many
alternative BitTorrent clients such as Azureus or BitComet? In both of
those you've been able to set absolute upload/download speeds for as
long as I've been using them. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BitTorrent_clients for a full-ish list.

Not quite what you want (not the same level of control), but with
Azureus and the SpeedScheduler plugin for it you can schedule what speed
you want it to run and when, ideal for letting things get up to speed
overnight for example.

 

The error message is "ERROR: FAIL TO UPDATE DUE TO... The maximum
number of subclass layers allowed per interface is reached." This is
if I try and add a child to a child, just two levels down from the
root.

I've also discovered that there's a total limit of ten child classes
which is even more limiting! Thus any strategy using one child class
per BitTorrent port is pretty well useless as it would use up all the
classes.

I've come up with a strategy that makes things better at least, I've
set all traffic on the BitTorrent machine to have a lower priority
than that on other machines. That has at least made typing this over
an ssh link much more user friendly.

Yes, that would seem to be it. However I'm still not quite sure about
setting Source and Destination. For example if I set up a child class
with just the Source set to 192.168.1.123 and the destination set to
0.0.0.0 what happens? Would this class affect traffic for *all*
destinations from source 192.168.1.123? If so if I set both Source
and Destination to 192.168.1.123 will that manage all traffic both in
and out of that machine or will it limit only 'loop back' traffic?

 

Hmm, all I can suggest is that you check for newer firmware and/or get in
touch with Zyxel.

[snip]

I assume you mean that the destination is left blank; if the protocol and
source/destination ports are also left blank, and TOS/TOS mask are both 0,
the filter would match packets that should leave the relevant interface on
the router with 192.168.1.123 as the source address - that is, irrespective
of destination address. (For the WAN interface the source address probably
means the untranslated one, rather than the actual address in the packet,
but that's not certain.)

It isn't explicitly stated that I can see, but I would expect the parameters
to be combined with 'AND'. If so, packets that should leave the relevant
interface on the router with that source AND destination will be assigned to
the class containing the filter. No such packets would exist under normal
circumstances.

Alex

 

I have been in touch with support there but, while helpful, they don't
seem to have an answer to this.

I've just twigged how it works, the wording on the web configurator
told me:-

BW Manager manages the bandwidth of traffic flowing out of router
on the specific interface. BW Manager can be switched on/off
independently for each interface.

Note that it says ".... of traffic flowing out of route on the
specific interface.", it means exactly this. There is a different set
of classes for the LAN side and the WAN side of the router. Thus to
manage outgoing traffic one sets up a class on the WAN side with a
*source* destination from the LAN side. To manage incoming traffic
one does the opposite.

I discovered this is right by using the traffic monitor and playing
with the settings.

Phew - I think I'm just about there now!

 

Yep; if you think about it, you can only schedule and prioritise what you
transmit - you're not in (direct) control of what you receive and when.

Alex