Re: Bandwidth..

> Sorry for the off-topic post.
> i was curious if anyone knows any solutions
> for bandwidth limiting. etc. right now i have users
> on our network. andi want to limit they're connection speeds
> to 128k, 256k etc.. without them losing packets etc..
> i tried using ciscos "Commited Access Rate" limiting.
> but it seems to just drop packets that exceed the speed specifications
> thus causing alot of problems.

1: Squid delay pools

   These work by reducing the rate at which data is permitted to flow, ie, at
   the TCP layer.

2: rate-limit command on Ciscos

   As you mentioned, this works at a lower layer - basically dropping packets.

3: FreeBSD "pipes" in ipfw

   These can work either by dropping packets or by adding artificial latency.

I have had the purposes to use all of these and a number of other techniques
(including SOCKS daemons communicating via shared memory and a Harvest cache
parenting via SOCKS... long ago) and each definitely has its uses. They are
all quite well documented so read about them and see... there are also ways
to do bandwidth limiting in the Linux kernel, as well as commercial solutions
which scale up to single boxes to rate limit all traffic to thousands of IP
addresses to fixed per-user rates. However the Squid one is the only one
I can think of that acts at the TCP layer to slow down the connections rather
than just dropping the packets.

David.

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David Luyer
Senior Network Engineer
Pacific Internet (Aust) Pty Ltd
Phone:  +61 3 9674 7525
Fax:    +61 3 9699 8693
Mobile: +61 4 1064 2258, +61 4 1114 2258
http://www.pacific.net.au        NASDAQ: PCNTF
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