Thanks for the suggestions Ray,
I know iptables has an option to limit the amount of connections to a certain port per [second/hour/day]. But I'm really looking for something that would control the amount of connections going to his computer/that port on his computer...perhaps I'll try bering and see what happens tho.
I'm not sure what application he's using, but I'm sure it's not for legitimate purposes (Well what P2P app is really used by most people for those anyway?), but I did verify that he has his connection limit set to 500. We just share the bandwidth, I don't really touch any of his stuff. I checked my seawall configuration, and it appeared to have nothing set for the MASQ timeouts - I set it to 1800 10 120 (I know it's low, but I'd rather start low and work my way up. Immediately 400 connections were closed, so I'll see how that works.
It's been way too long since I used this stuff for me to be sure, but I suspect this is set in the Dach config files, not in Seawall. (No doubt Tom or Charles can advise you with more certainty than I.) In any case, you can check the values actually in place with "ipchains -M -L". The true defaults are *very* low, however, so I doubt you were using them.
If your colleague's stale connections are UDP (typical for P2P stuff, but not universal, and you didn't actually say), the values you chose should limit them quite well. If they are TCP ... 1800 seconds is 30 minutes, really quite long for this sort of problem.
Part of the problem may be that I'm running a 486 DX/33, but if I run top on it, I'm usually 70-90% idle. So I don't think that should be a problem, of course I could be wrong. I do have one VPN tunnel set up, but almost nothing travels over it (some DNS/Wins stuff, and occasionally a SSH session) as it is used for testing.
If the VPN were a problem it would show itself in CPU usage as reported by "top" (iI was just suggesting VPN because its encryption might load a CPU). So I doubt it is system load per se.
The 25% is pretty close to being correct, I also have MRTG setup so I can see how much bandwidth is being used - while it does fluctuate, it rarely hits 50% of my available bandwidth (real bandwidth, not the ISP's advertised bandwidth).
Without knowing the details here, it is hard to say anything intelligent. I suppose the large number of connections made could be causing some upstream delay at the ISP (even something imposed deliberately, to discourage use of P2P apps ... ISPs often share you view of P2P), but speculating on the possible details of that sort of problem in this context is hopeless.
For now I'll mess around with the MASQ timeout setting and see where that gets me.[old stuff deleted]
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