traffic shaping

[Matthew Carpenter]

I learned a lot about traffic-shaping while learning about Linux 
firewalls in 2.4.  Of particular interest is the Advanced Routing HOWTO 
from tldp.org.  It is old now, but covers what you are asking about.

After several years in the telecom world, I've found it important to 
clarify what is being discussed with the term "traffic shaping".  The 
original Linux approach (and I believe the better method) either 
guarantees or limits bandwidth based on statistics, etc... 

Cisco's approach is based around what they call "Quality of Service" or 
QoS.  It is the practice of tagging packets with a priority and routing 
based on that priority.  This isn't necessarily good, because over a 
limited amount of bandwidth, some traffic may never be passed.

Having built several 2.6 kernels recently, I have learned that many new 
options are available from the 2.4 days.  Look specifically in Device 
Drivers -> Networking Support -> Networking Options -> QoS and/or fair 
queuing
The user-space tools can be found in the specific Help for each option.

HtH

Net Llama! wrote:

>Anyone done any traffic shaping?  Specifically, I've got a customer who's
>complaining about bandwidth problems into an Indian office, and wants to
>control the priority of packets split between cvs and https traffic.
>Specifically, he wants to guarentee 30% for https between their Indian
>office and a server i'm responsible for, or cap cvs (over ssh) to 70%.
>
>Is this even possible?  Alternatively, is it possible for them to do the
>shaping on their end?
>
>thanks!
>
>  
>