Question Force steam updates to use secondary internet connection

[AhmadKar]

I'm not sure if this is possible or not but I'm asking anyway and hopefully someone could help.

I have about 10 Computers in one LAN and i have two internet connections from two different ISP's, The problem i face, is that when one of these computers is updating a game on steam lets say all other computers start lagging in games and it feels like the whole bandwidth is allocated to that computer who is updating.


How can I allocate one connection for updates only and the other one for everything else such as gaming and browsing without installing two network cards on each computer?

Do I need a firewall to accomplish what I want? If yes, is pfsense open source firewall suitable?


Sorry for my bad English

 

[bill001g]

How do you currently have 2 internet connections connected.

What you can do is say let your main router be say 192.168.1.1 and do all the network function. The second router you assign 192.168.1.2 and disable the dhcp server. Connect a lan port between the devices. So at this point you have both internet connection but the second will not be used.

You could change the gateway on the pc to point to 192.168.1.2 and it would use the other internet.

Now if you asked how do I make netflix run on the second connection and everything else run on the main that one is to a point simple. You use the ROUTE command and add routes for all the servers in netflix and point them to the 192.168.1.2 gateway.

Now in theory you could do that with steam also BUT what you want is just the update function of steam to use the second connection. I have not dug around steam to know if their download servers actually appear as different IP address compared to their "game" server. I also don't know what happens if you were to access 2 different steam server from different IP (your 2 ISP) at the same time. They likely consider this hacking.

 

[USAFRet]

What is the overall bandwidth coming into this facility?

 

[AhmadKar]

How do you currently have 2 internet connections connected.

What you can do is say let your main router be say 192.168.1.1 and do all the network function. The second router you assign 192.168.1.2 and disable the dhcp server. Connect a lan port between the devices. So at this point you have both internet connection but the second will not be used.

You could change the gateway on the pc to point to 192.168.1.2 and it would use the other internet.

Now if you asked how do I make netflix run on the second connection and everything else run on the main that one is to a point simple. You use the ROUTE command and add routes for all the servers in netflix and point them to the 192.168.1.2 gateway.

Now in theory you could do that with steam also BUT what you want is just the update function of steam to use the second connection. I have not dug around steam to know if their download servers actually appear as different IP address compared to their "game" server. I also don't know what happens if you were to access 2 different steam server from different IP (your 2 ISP) at the same time. They likely consider this hacking.

I have two internet connections but till now I'm only using one of them and searching for a method to use both.

 

[alceryes]

I don't think you can on the computer level and it's against Steam's policy to use proxies and VPN (last time I checked). Maybe it's possible on your networking level but that depends on the firewall/router in place.

IMO, an easier way to do this is to limit the per-device bandwidth to a reasonable level in your router/firewall. Even most basic routers have bandwidth limitation options. You can also configure bandwidth limits within the Steam app.