Limit Transfer Speed on Windows 2008

I have a Windows 2008 server that needs to have the network card traffic capped at 1 or 2 megabits. Does anyone know if this can be accomplished by the Network card settings, registry trickery, or open-source/freeware applications?

Solution 1:

This should be configured through GPO by applying a throttle rate to all source IP addresses associated to the card. See http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=59030735-8fde-47c7-aa96-d4108f779f20&displaylang=en for a detailed explanation.

Solution 2:

Ummm, why would you want to restrict the network traffic? This type of setting I believe would have to be done at the switch level. If not what you can do is set your NIC to 10 Mbps half/full if you want to do that sort of thing on the server-side.

Solution 3:

You could do it at the user level through group policy -> Network -> Limit Reservable Bandwidth and tuning it up to X% [10mbs would yield 80% reserved, 100mbps would be 98%]. However, this is only per user, if you have a system that runs all of it's apps as something besides administrator, YMMV.

Generally, however, this is easier to do through your switch and traffic shaping tools. Or if you really just need a speed reduction, kick the port into half-duplex.