Bandwidth control

Wonder Shaper

With so many of us now working from home, our Internet connections have become more than just delivery mechanisms for online distractions. They've become our commutes and our offices, and while most people have enough bandwidth to cope, many more of us need to carefully juggle downloads and movie streaming with our video meetings and company town halls. This is where a router's quality of service (QoS) settings can really help because they enable you to prioritize certain devices or protocols over others. But not all routers have this feature, and there are surprisingly few other options if you need to limit the bandwidth on some of your computers. However, Wonder Shaper is one of them, and it's a tool that can save your job if you need to attend an important meeting while the rest of the household is trying to make sense of The Rings of Power in 4K HDR.

Wonder Shaper isn't a separate utility but a script you run from the command line, because the Linux kernel already includes all the features you need to limit a network connection using "Traffic Control." Traffic Control even has its own command, tc, which can be used to perform all kinds of network shaping. But as you might imagine for a tool that interfaces with both the kernel and your network packets, it can be difficult to use and can easily have negative consequences. Wonder Shaper is a front end to this complexity, allowing you to set simple limits for incoming and outgoing data (ingress and egress, in network terminology), and it works brilliantly. It's perfect if you have a machine downloading updates, for example, or on a laptop being used for Netflix. By running ./wondershaper -a eth0 -u 4096 -d 8192 on either device, you limit upload and download speeds to 4Mbps and 8Mbps respectively, and running the script again with different values will change those limits immediately.

Project Website

https://github.com/magnific0/wondershaper

If you've always been intimidated by the kernel level traffic shaping command tc, Wonder Shaper is the answer.

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