basic rate limiting howto for linux

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richms

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# 36579 29-Jun-2009 08:15

I have to look into rate limiting the connection here since the torrenting activities of others are starting to actually go fast enough to make browsing unplesent (I can tolerate youtube slowness when they are using it) - and voip is going choppy now - thats even with them limiting the speed in utorrent.

Firewall machine is running debian linux - have no idea what version at the moment, it used to be woody but things have been changed and updated so many times on it... I would consider putting something else in but the machine is also my asterisk machine.

Just need a basic howto on setting it up to do the following

bridge 2 nics together - one my stuff, one the AP to the other guys
Give them second priority for anything going onto the internet when compared to my machines, but allow for full speed between the lans.

Easily doable?

Richard rich.ms

magu

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# 229094 29-Jun-2009 08:42

Certainly not easily for first-timers, but quite possible.

A starting point is http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/187 for the basics of rate-limiting with iptables. You can evolve from there.

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Ragnor

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# 229150 29-Jun-2009 11:16

You can probably find some precooked scripts for a standard QoS setup with a bit of googling. If you are lazy like me you might want to use a distro designed to be a firewall proxy on a old pc between as your gateway eg: Smoothwall, Monowall, pfsense etc.

Most of the the above distro's come with simple to use web ui's for setting things up thesedays.

mjb

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# 229490 30-Jun-2009 10:54

magu: Certainly not easily for first-timers, but quite possible.

A starting point is http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/187 for the basics of rate-limiting with iptables. You can evolve from there.

That's just connection rate limiting - while useful, it's no good for high throughput established connections. for that, you want tc. which gets oh so brain poppingly confusing until you get your head around it.

This is just one example: http://luxik.cdi.cz/~devik/qos/htb/manual/userg.htm

So, ultimately, Ragnor is right - you probably want an all-in-one firewall package that has the magic to do all this already, with a nice easy to use web interface for configuration. I believe some of the packages Ragnor lists do this, I've not used any so can't help there sorry.

edit: hah, he actually mentions web interfaces. mjb reading comprehension: fail. :)

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rphenix

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# 229512 30-Jun-2009 12:12

Start with this:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/QoS+Linux+with+HFSC

(it also requires tc to be installed) but at least its a pretty good useful example. My problem with traffic shaping is not so much national bandwidth but international. You have to limit your connection for shaping to work properly, but you dont want to limit your national traffic to your international speed and if you factor in different speeds to different countries (china will be much slower than USA for example) it gets more complex :)

I use output from geoip for my tc rules at the moment but its far too complex for my liking I've been meaning to investigate other solutions.

I would add one comment while all in one distro's such as pfsense are great I don't like being limited to their feature set so also run debian on our firewall.