Rate Limiting on Cisco Router

Fri Jul 9 05:33:04 UTC 2010

On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 20:01 -0400, Brandon Kim wrote:
> What about purchasing a low-end packetshaper to be used in between?

If -

1/ budget is a problem

and

2/ you have no BSD knowledge inhouse

and 

3/ the LAN side is all ethernet

you could have a stab at using a PFsense box with two (and strictly ONLY
two, for this use) physical NICs. It has a GUI to set up traffic shaping
(see the sticky on the pfsense forums) PFsense 1.2.3 is current, don't
go for the experimental 2.0 for production. There's a book and
commercial support if you need it, free support via forums if you can't.

Only two physical NICs is necessary due to shaper problems with more
than two, whereas in a firewalling role the slots are the only limit
(but VLANS are the norm for bucketloads of ports on a firewall PFsense
box) 
An ITX (Littlefalls etc) mobo with 512MB RAM with an extra PCI Intel NIC
added will do you fine
. 
PFsense has nice traffic graphs, which helps you with shaping speeds in
a big way. It also has a TFTP server available for it so it's handy for
unmanned sites with only a few blue boxes ;)

PS - a crazy afterthough - surely just about anything with a 10/100
ethernet link running at 100 and placed inline, cannot exceed 100Mbps -
and probably less if it's plastic-cased? Try a few 8-port junkers and
see what happens if you fancy a walk on the dangerous side. Watch out
for errors and smoke :) 

Gord
--
The drinker you are the smoker you get