We’ve got a Balance One that for now uses only one WAN connection, recently switched to a 100Mb/s symmetrical fiber service.
We’re experiencing problems with the line becoming saturated due to heavy up&downloading of multi-gig media files from a few different computers, as well as the normal web / email traffic of our staff. When it saturates we eventually lose all connectivity.
I’d like to find a way to limit the bandwidth used by any single connection to either a fixed value or a percentage. I’d guess 95+% of all traffic is web-based (port 80/443) so per-protocol or per-port limits would be pointless. I can’t find anything in the Balance setup that would seem to help. Many of the ‘offending’ computers are visiting clients who are DHCP-assigned, so a solution that worked on the range of DHCP addresses would probably be workable.
Any thoughts on how the Balance One could help us out?
Will you consider to turn on Individual Bandwidth limit to limit maximum download speed (over all WAN connections) and upload speed (for each WAN connection) that each individual Staff and Guest member can consume ?
For more information, please refer to the attached screenshots.
Ah, yes, that may be good enough, since I can identify the DHCP range easily. Thanks, I’ll try that tomorrow.
As a followup, what may be a silly question: If I restrict one group to (say) 70% of the total b/w, and I also restrict a different group to 70%, will the total available b/w still be available to the network as a whole? I’m not capping total data at 70%, am I?
The prtscrn Sitloong has shown you applies to individual users of the specific group, not a group limit.
5Mbps under Download for Staff group means each staff can achieve a maximum of 5Mbps download.
Regarding your question… say you got 10 staffs which you cap at 5Mbps and nobody else is using the internet, then yes, you’re utilizing only 50% of your total 100Mbps if we’re just talking about download and not upload. My suggestion is, since you already pin-pointed your offending users, to assign them to the guest group and limit their bandwidth, unrestricted for the rest of your users and monitor if your bandwidth problem persists.
Thanks, Kevin. Knowing that it’s a per-user limit does change the complexion of it somewhat. If I assign the entire address space to a group, I can effectively say that no single user can exceed the limit, which might be good enough. Are these entries hierarchical? Could I assign all the addresses to a Manager group at 50Mb/s, then carve out a Staff group in the middle of that range for separate treatment, say 20Mb/s?
The wrinkle is that our DHCP pool sits in the middle of the entire space – if the address space is xx.xx.1.1 through xx.xx.1.254, the DHCP pool is from (say) .1.101 through .1.180. I know that doesn’t fit into a neat CIDR range, but could I trim it one way or another to fit, with a few stragglers left ungrouped. Thoughts?
Recommended settings will be set everyone in Staff Group (20Mbps) and define privilege devices as Manager group. You can reserve manager devices IP by using DHCP reservation.
DHCP Reservation Client (Those registered devices will had unlimited access or you can play around with the user group with the individual MAX download/upload speeds) :
My MK2 is missing some of these screens… under Bandwidth control, missing “Group Bandwidth Reservation” and under “Individual Bandwidth Limit” I cannot select any of the groups that I created… Is there a secret menu to enable these settings? Thanks!
Discussion above is mostly about using Individual bandwidth limits. Wouldn’t this application be better served with Group limits? As I understand it, with the example below if the Manager bandwidth is not used at the time it is available to Staff or Guest. If a manager device comes alive it gets priority. With that method Staff and Guest get access to more speed when Manager is not using it all. That is quite different than Individual limits where the user is capped even though the remainder of the system may be dormant at the time.
