Introduction
In short p2pshaper is a set of scripts for the Linux OS, that is
used to administer bandwidth on a network overloaded by massive p2p
traffic.
Normally, the amount of peer-to-peer traffic on such networks, will
make it impossible to surf, not to mention doing interactive traffic
(ssh). The normal action is to shut down p2p traffic totally, and set
up the net, so that Internet connection is only possible through a
proxy. This breaks many useful programs. And not all p2p traffic is
evil. Normally, one would mark packets coming to a specific port
(emule ports) to be of a lower priority than packets to other
ports. This used to be a good solution. But now, there exist a huge
number of p2p clients, eact with different port ranges, and also, some
programs are able to change the ports. Normally the Internet newsgroup
port should have a high priority. But binary newsgroups are sometimes
used for massive downloads, which will use up all bandwidth. Better
packet markers are needed.
p2pshaper currently exists in two versions p2pshaper v1 and
p2pshaper v2. They both works in different ways, so v2 is not "better"
than v1. Which one you use depends on what kind of functonality you
want.