On Tuesday 18 February 2003 07:47, John Maier wrote:
>
> My workaround...limit the number of simultanious connections to 20 and limit
> the bandwidth.

Just limit the overall bandwidth and let the users fight amongst themselves. 
Don't limit the total number of connections--put the bandwidth to what you 
can sustain and let them learn a bit more about what a tragedy of the commons 
means.

> Anyway I'm seeing some people who think I'm Napster and try to download 5+
> songs at once.  This of course eats up 5 of my 10 available slots, chokeing
> out 4 potential people.  Of couse there's no real advantage to this, since
> each download is potentialy just 1/5 (assuming 5 connections) of the speed a
> single download from me.

I think bandwidth solutions are superior in this regard. You can never be sure 
that the same IP address is the same person, or different IP addresses are 
from different people--for example, I have both cable and adsl. I can thus 
download twice as fast as anyone else can in a bandwidth-per-connection or 
-per-ip limited situation and there's little anyone can do about it because 
the two IP addresses are so different. But limit the total amount of 
bandwidth and the best anyone can do is max it out to that value and no 
faster--including people like me.

You'll never be able to limit it on a per-human-being basis without some kind 
of authentication beforehand--like visit a webpage, authorize the download, 
and then limit that location to only one connection at a time.