[rescue] IP traffic prioritizer?

[Jeff Workman]

Stoned koalas drooled eucalyptus spit in awe as jwbirdsa at picarefy.com 
exclaimed:

>    I'm looking at hosting something that could conceivably peg the
> outbound side of my T1. In one sense, that's fine, since it doesn't cost
> me any more to run it at 100% than at 10%, but at the same time, I'd like
> packets from my other servers to be able to get out in a timely fashion.
> It seems to me what I'd really like to do is establish a policy in the
> gateway between my internal backbone and the Cisco handling the T1,
> which says "packets from IP address X go out only when there are no
> packets from any other address waiting." Unless I'm missing something,
> this should allow the server at X to use whatever fraction of the T1 is
> left over (which is 75% or more, most of the time) while at the same time
> giving my other servers what appears to be a mostly clear channel.
>
>    I'm sure this isn't a unique problem, but I don't know what to look
> for. I'd prefer some kind of package that I could run on NetBSD but I
> have plenty of other platforms if a better solution is available that
> way. Does anybody have any ideas?

OpenBSD and I think FreeBSD can do queuing strategies using "altq."  I 
think it was designed for when the machine is being used as a router, but I 
don't see what would stop it from being used on a server machine as well.

If it's a Linux machine, I'm pretty sure you can do traffic shaping with 
ipchains or iptables, depending on which kernel you're running.

For commercial unices, I'm not sure of anything that can be implemented on 
the server, however, as others have suggested, you can do traffic shaping 
on the upstream router if you've got access to it.  This is probably a 
better solution than doing it on the client machine.

-Jeff

--
Jeff Workman | jworkman at pimpworks.org | http://www.pimpworks.org