slowing down the leeches

Bandwidth, the one thing you really gain an appreciation for at college. Ok, so there were a few other things I gained an appreciation for whilst at RIT. Even so, a speedy network pipe makes me quite happy (unlike the one i have at work). At times even the speediest network will reach its limit, an event generally caused by a few parties on the network using p2p apps. At times I've been that person, and I'm sure others were frustrated by that (though they probably didn't know it was me). The solution is traffic shaping, which is built into linux. The gentoo wiki and forum both have write-ups regarding the subject. They also mention l7-filter and ipp2p which are projects that will attempt to detect p2p traffic based upon its application layer data.