Re: Traffic shaping

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:55:14PM -0700, Steven Kurylo wrote:
> Can anyone point me towards a solution for this?

Last time I looked, some common shaping algorithms were supported in OpenBSD
and all the common ones plus a few out-there algorithms were supported in
iproute2 on Linux.

There's a couple of approaches to try depending on your objective.

If you are trying to ensure for example that VoIP traffic doesn't get killed
by big file transfers, then you should probably look at this from a QOS/
prioritization perspective rather than strictly shaping/limiting. For this,
look at diffserv at the switch or just using the IP TOS and something like
class based weighted fair queuing.

If you simply want to evenly distribute total bandwidth among active hosts,
regardless of how much bandwidth they are demanding (eg the dude downloading
ISO images from a fast server doesn't swamp the three people surfing the web
or listening to streaming audio) then that's a limiting/shaping problem.
Look at one of the round-robin algorithms.

Another clever approach might be to shape the TCP ACKs using a random early
drop algorithm. This is usually the easiest way to get TCP to throttle
itself. It's also the reason Shaw gets anal about servers on their
asymmetric cable modem connections, too much upload will throttle the TCP
acks for downloads on the shared media.

Here's a few links:
http://www.tech-faq.com/qos.shtml
http://lartc.org/howto/

Also, OpenBSD man page for pf.conf (OpenBSD 3.3 or newer).
Received on Fri Jul 21 17:28:48 2006