davidpaj
join:2002-04-22
| Cheap Traffic Shapping
I know this topic gets beat to death here. I'm the small guy about 20 clients. I know monowall gets talked about alot here. However, is it true that XBOX Live/PS3 and other similar services don't run through monowall? I have a network of serveral gamers so I don't want to knock them out... I can get a monowall box for $129.... Any other solutions? I'll pay more, but I don't have the money for a netequilizar for sure... |
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IntraLink
Premium,MVM
join:2002-08-14
Utah Valley
| We use Mikrotik.
You can run it on a lot of x86 basic computers, or you can purchase one of their routerboards for $150 or so.
XBox and other services run fine over Mikrotik and you can watch your 20 customers traffic in real time to see who's using all the bandwidth. You can chart them too given that you only have 20 (queue them and graph them).
Mikrotik is a bit complicated to learn, but it has a client GUI that does a pretty good job of holding your hand and letting you visually select stuff to see what happens... |
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davidpaj
join:2002-04-22 | hand holding....... good idea... never tried mikrotik I've heard you guys talk about the learning curve so much |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA | reply to davidpaj
The big problems I have seen with gaming consoles has been more related to NAT then traffic shaping, particularly with the 360.
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CCNA, Comtrain Certified Tower Climber |
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lutful
Premium
join:2005-06-16
Ottawa, ON
 ·TekSavvy Solutions..
| reply to davidpaj
said by davidpaj  :However, is it true that XBOX Live/PS3 and other similar services don't run through monowall? FYI m0n0wall (and pfSense) implement traditional NAT, 1:1 NAT, custom NAT, and of course you can turn off NAT. If you can access some service through a SoHo or gaming router, you can configure m0n0wall to do the same. Ditto for Mikrotik.  |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| said by lutful :said by davidpaj :However, is it true that XBOX Live/PS3 and other similar services don't run through monowall? FYI m0n0wall (and pfSense) implement traditional NAT, 1:1 NAT, custom NAT, and of course you can turn off NAT. If you can access some service through a SoHo or gaming router, you can configure m0n0wall to do the same. Ditto for Mikrotik. While I completely agree with Lutful, suffice to say that in my experience it is a little bit more tricky to setup than on a soho router. As the previous thread on double nat and gaming showed, eliminating the double nat fixed the problem simply instead of having to troubleshoot with UPNP and forwarding etc. |
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superdog
I Need A Drink
Premium,MVM
join:2001-07-13
Lebanon, PA
 ·WaveCrazy.Net
| Monowall will help your traffic out a little, but in my mind, it is still a router with bandwidth shaping as an after thought. It won't allow you to control the # of connections (At least I could never find it?) and the throttling limits are hard coded, which simply means that if you enter a rule and set a customer @ 384k, that is what they will get. It would be nicer if that user could burst or even get more bandwidth if no one was using it but I don't believe you can set that up with M0n0wall?.
Even though I have never used it?, I do believe MT would be a better option unless you want to spend the $$ for a NetEq box?.
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»www.wavecrazy.net
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battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000 | reply to davidpaj
Tell us what you have. What router are you using? What is your connection to the web? Are you using NAT or public IPs for each customer? |
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MicroWISP
join:2008-01-30
TX Republic
| reply to davidpaj
I am using a pfSense router/firewall as my gateway running my throttling and shaping and bursting. I also run Squid on the same box to cache web content to take an additional load off our bandwidth. T1 connection for the feed. Important things I need to see and access from the outside world have public IPs, customers have NAT. I am thinking of adding in Untangle for better Peer to Peer management, we will see.
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"Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it." |
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Jerm
join:2000-04-10
Richland, WA
| reply to davidpaj
Some observations...
I use pfSense in transparent bridge mode and then setup queues for different types of traffic.
I've kept everything very simple, and basically set HTTP (web), UDP (for games), and ACKs to high/highest prority, FTP to medium, and everything else low/regular (ie P2P).
What this does for me is web browsing is always good, even if I have P2P and downloads going. Games are acceptable. And P2P can't overrun regular downloads.
The thing about traffic shaping is you really can only fully shape the upstream, because by the time you shape the downstream it's already gone through your WAN pipe (the bottleneck) impacted latency and what not.
I've done some very intresting tests with pfSense, and it really does work. For example, on my 10/1 connection if I saturate the downstream my latency will increase from 12ms to Seattle to about 100-150ms. However if I saturate my upstream my pings go upwards of 500-600ms.
When I enabled the traffic shaping as described above, I could have a friend in a FPS game (most latency sensitive) and run P2P and downloads all day. Latency in game would only climb from the normal 15ms to 50ms or so. However if I started a simple ICMP ping I would still see 500ms+ latency! pfSense was really doing the job well, basically allowing the game to get priority and keep it playable, while still saturating the pipe.
Needless to say I've been very impressed. |
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DaSneaky1D
one wall to block them all
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-29
The Lou
 ·Charter Pipeline
| reply to davidpaj
Re: Cheap Traffic Shapping
As a note, Xbox Live works great with m0n0wall. You have to specify specific NAT rules to turn a Moderate NAT to Open, and if you want to scale it to many customers, you'll have to either filter public IP addresses to each cust or do 1:1 NATing.
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:: my trivial ramblings :: |
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CMack
@cablelan.net
| reply to davidpaj
Jumping in late here, but how are you serving the 20 clients? 2.4Ghz? 900Mhz? other?
We use the AirEqualizer from the same people who build the NetEq, they run about $600 and have a scaled down version of the NetEq right in the 900Mhz and 2.4Ghz access point.
We highly recommend for shaping!
CMack |
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