Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Leave My Router Open? 520
generalhavok writes "I read the story on Slashdot earlier about the EFF encouraging people to leave their WiFi open to share the internet. I would like to do this! I don't mind sharing my connection and letting my neighbors check their email or browse the web. However, when I used to leave it open, I quickly found my limited bandwidth dissappearing, as my neighbors started using it heavily by streaming videos, downloading large files, and torrenting. What is an easy way I can share my internet, while enforcing some limits so there is enough bandwidth left for me? What about separating the neighbors from my internal home network? Can this be done with consumer-grade routers? If the average consumer wants to share, what's the easiest and safest way to do it?"
think again? u aint thunk yet (Score:2, Interesting)
The DMCA protects service providers. If I am deliberately sharing my internet connection, I AM a defacto service provider. There are rules one must follow but most of them apply only to operators of a certain size - which means we enjoy the protections of the DMCA without sharing the burdens like forced record keeping.
People have been abused by law enforcement for al sorts of reasons. If they go to far, you sue. Of course, if they are led to your house by the actions of a neighbor and then find, through some poetic justice, that you are in fact doing what they suspected even though it wasn't your actions that directly led to the raid, well then it sucks to be you.
OpenWRT/Tomato/DD-WRT or bust (Score:4, Interesting)
For setting up bandwidth limiting for OpenWRT, well, OpenWRT is for real men (or real women), as this wiki page should make clear [openwrt.org]. Losta commandline and config files; there are web frontends but I'm unsure if any let you fiddle with these kinds of powers. But if you're looking for fine-tuned control, OpenWRT is pretty much a distro in its own right so the possibilities are pretty vast.
For Tomato (which I use 'cause the graphs are pretty), unlike what SighKoPath has said here, you don't have to set up specific rules for each MAC or IP; just set up the classifications for your own devices, then in QoS -> Basic Settings set the Default Class to something like, say, Class E. Now you can set the bandwidth limits for random strangers in Class E and any device or type of traffic that you don't have an overriding rule for gets categorized in Class E, so any new random neighbor devices will fall into that class. Simple.
As far as routers go, a lot of existing routers (as long as you didn't buy a really bad one with too little memory to even install anything to) are supported by at least one of the three main firmwares. Tomato is far more restricted in terms of choice, but if you can't find a spare WRT-54Gv1-4 lying around, Linksys deliberately sells the WRT-54GL for the sake of folks who'd like to install Linux-based alternate firmwares. For OpenWRT you can check their Table of Hardware [openwrt.org], random pick, the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH is good bang-for-your-buck. DD-WRT's equivalent table is here [dd-wrt.com]; you can actually get some routers, like Buffalo's WHR-HP-G54-DD, which come with DD-WRT pre-installed. Never actually tried DD-WRT myself . . . I'm a bit of an open-source zealot, and DD-WRT has had a somewhat sketchy record. Plus, have I mentioned Tomato has pretty graphs?