Bandwidth nazi

Rasjid rasjidw at bigpond.com
Thu Oct 4 20:08:57 EST 2001


Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> 
> I believe you have a wetware problem. You could spend
> a lot of time partitioning bandwidth and still get user
> paranoia. Might be simpler to just keep load statistics
> and demonstrate the link never gets saturated anyway.
> 
> Even taking into account peak usage happening between
> 6 and 9, you'll probably top the 3 Gb cap more often
> than you will saturate the link.
> 
> Antti

I tend to agree with the above.  We have around 35 users at work over a
single ADSL link and except when Telstra are having problems performance
has been just fine.

As for actually sharing the connection, I highly recommend Smoothwall. 
It will run quite happily on a 486.  I have not used it for ADSL,
although the latest version is supposed to deal with that easily.  The
configuration is very simple, and its transparent web proxy would make a
difference with regards reaching the 3GB cap, and also improve the
perceived speed.

It also has a nice load graphing function to prove how little the link
gets saturated, and for the (rightly) paranoid it is by all accounts a
very good firewall.

If you really want the load allocation, I'm fairly sure you could also
install cbq.init on Smoothwall.  You would simply need to install
iproute, provided that the Smoothwall kernel has the appropriate
support.

See ftp://ftp.equinox.gu.net/pub/linux/cbq/ as suggested previoiusly.

Also see http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Bandwidth-Limiting-HOWTO/

Cheers,

Rasjid.




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