Re: [PLUG] Bandwidth Shaping

[Will Dyson <will.dyson@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Glenn Kelley <glenn@typo3usa.com> wrote:
> Sounds good.
>
> I know some of the equipment they use have some QOS that can be done -
> however I was more thinking of an appliance or a server level that
> could be run @ the head ends
>
> something like netequalizer except free

Linux and the various BSDs each have capable traffic-shaping
frameworks. Netequalizer is very likely built on one of them. What
they provide is a pre-configured QOS policy that (they say) provides
good results in a wide range of environments.

There are a good number of router-focused distributions out there that
make it more or less easy to apply whatever QOS policy you want. Of
course, knowing what you want is the hard part...

The previously mentioned OpenWrt is a good candidate. Despite being
designed with the needs of small routers in mind, it works fine on
regular x86 hardware (although the docs do not focus on this). Has
both a built-in web-UI and an alternate set of web-UI packages
(http://www.x-wrt.org/). Both web-UIs make some attempt to handle the
setup of traffic shaping (I've only evaluated the built-in LuCI one,
and its shaping component could be better).

I also like (and have more experience with) the FreeBSD-based PFSense
(http://www.pfsense.org/). Its web-UI is more mature than OpenWrt's,
especially in the area of firewall and shaping configuration. FreeBSD
also features CARP
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/carp.html), which seems
like a very good feature for this sort of equipment.

-- 
Will Dyson
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