How control bandwidth to determined sites in local network

Question

I work in a company with around 20 employees, and some of then complain about slow internet sometimes, what happens is that some of the employees use a lot youtube, facebook and so on during the work hours. I would like to limit the bandwidth to these websites, unfortunatly I can't just block them.

Right now our network setup is super basic, we have a file server runnning Windows Server 2012 R2 and around 10 computers connected to a switch, which is also connected to the ISP modem. Our ISP modem and switch is pretty basic, so no config there. What I was looking for is somehow to connect our modem to the 2012 server so the server can filter the requests, and then the server to the switch to distribute the connection through the network. So the server would almost act as an router.

Answer 1

You don't have the hardware to do what you want. The 2012 server is not meant to do that type of action.

What you need is a configurable fireawll that has the ability to filter and limit traffic based on destination hostname. This isn't a full-proof solution, but it's a great limiter for most deployments.

You can look into open source stuff like PFSense to act as a new gateway to perform this type of task as well, but you would have to re-do the network topology to put it in the right place in the network.

As a side note, Meraki is an easy to use and configure network appliance that can do this directly in the WiFi access-point, or at a network level via a switch or gateway. It's not cheap, but also doesn't require super in-depth network knowledge to configure.