Bad Latency

[minimalis]

Hello,

I've been living in a private dorm for 2 years now. Unfortunately the guy who was maintaining the network just moved out and took the server computer with himself. Right now we only have a modem->router setup with no server.
The problem with this is that from 8am to 1am the latency is very awful, which makes online/competitive gaming impossible.
Is there any way to improve latency?
I know nothing about networks, so pardon my stupidity, but I think that many people use bittorrent clients which make a lot of connections and that's what raising the latency, while keeping the bandwidth relatively normal.
Also I have a notebook I do not use. I know it sounds silly, but can I somehow make a server out of it? (Via buying a decent network card and some more memory)

Thanks for you help in advance.

 

[bill001g]

What function did the server perform. The only way the server would have made a difference was if it was between the modem and the router to limit the traffic.

If you are talking a gaming server that you used locally then I will have to defer to others on this forum for a recommendation.

 

[minimalis]

It was a Debian Linux server, handling the connections afaik. I know that it controlled the bandwidth (4mbps for everone) and also if you wanted to forward a port you had to set it on the server via command prompt. Unfortunately, as I said, I do not know many thing about networking, but it seems like it had a role you said.

 

[bill001g]

More than likely he was running a the server as a router. I suspect he had multiple network cards in the server although it can be done with one it just gets even more complex.

It does not take a lot of cpu power so a laptop CAN do it but it is more a issue of learning the tools. You will find a number of discussion on how to use a pc as a router under linux. Like most things you get for free the support is limited so you end up having to learn quite a lot about a number of things to be able to support yourself.