Carl F
@speakeasy.n
| Traffic Management
I have a question, for folks familiar with the capabilities that routing/switching equipment offers to the ISPs who own and operate it.
What capabilities does the current generation of equipment offer by way of traffic management?
In (the likely) case that I'm abusing the nomenclature, what I mean by this is the ability to impose policies/rules/criteria for how bandwidth gets allocated, what kind of traffic gets priority over other traffic, etc.
Including, but not limited to, for example, some combination of: by protocol, by source IP, by destination IP, by destination port, by packet length, by physical line, etc.
What attributes of the traffic and/or the network configuration/topology can be used to manage the allocation of bandwidth?
Thanks,
Carl F. |
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ykrad
join:2001-08-23
Petaluma, CA
| First off, there's probably a better place for this question - but I understand why you'd post here, there's a lot of activity from people with Network experience in this forum.
As far as consumers level products go, you could definitely do this kind of management with a Linux router and iptables/netfilter with specific rules. Unfortunately I've yet to find an easy way to do this, it takes a lot of hacking rulesets to get things right. I know all of your examples could be accomplished with iptables - the functionality it there it's just got to be implemented intelligently.
For business level equipment, I couldn't say specifically. I haven't had that much experience with the expensive hardware stuff to know. I'm sure it exists though. One of the neat things I've seen are »www.routescience.com/ routescience boxes.
Hope this helps. |
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bsddaemon
join:2001-12-22
Dayton, OH
| QOS is a hot topic, but to give you a simple answer you can accomplish this with a openbsd router it is awesome and easier to work with pf than with iptables just my 2 cent. Here is an example.
»www.benzedrine.cx/ackpri.html
This is just a small example of what you can do. I actually have it setup with specific rules for port 80, 21, and 22, web ftp and ssh. ALQ and pf works wonders that is something you should look into. |
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Carl F
@speakeasy.n | reply to Carl F
Thanks for the replies.
Should I take it that, far from being rocket science, traffic management is a standard capability, implemented as a set of knobs that establish a queueing discipline?
Cheers,
Carl F. |
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borborpa
Slipping Slowly Into Oblivion
Premium
join:2002-02-20
New Cumberland, PA
clubs: | Carl, are you talking about managing a few computers at home, or SE's network? That makes a big difference.
--
There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots.[AIM - BoyBandsMakeUGay] |
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Carl F
@speakeasy.n | reply to Carl F
Hi SSIO -
I'm talking about SpeakEasy's network, and the capabilities of equipment from Juniper, Cisco, etc.
Thanks,
Carl F. |
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bsddaemon
join:2001-12-22
Dayton, OH
| I would venture to say the equipmen tis capable but if they have reason to deploy QOS on such a large network would be the question. Usually QOS is really centered around VOIP voice over ip. I do not think they are implementing any type of QOS on their network call up and ask them. But hey I work with Cisco equipment all day 6500' 8500's etc etc and it is definately capable of QOS. |
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Carl F
@speakeasy.n
| reply to Carl F
Hi bsddaemon -
So here's a hypothetical for you (or anyone).
Suppose I'm a national ISP, and there's a class of customer that can tell me up front what their upload bandwidth requirements are, and they'll pay a premium to have their upload delivered onto the network/internet at very high priority. That is, they can guarantee an upper limit on the volume of traffic they'll generate, so that I can assure that all the customers on my network will get, on average, all of the upload bandwidth they're paying for. However, this premium customer will get upload immediately upon demand, stalling other, normal customers' upload.
Can the current generation of equipment do this, or something like it?
Thanks,
Carl F. |
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bsddaemon
join:2001-12-22
Dayton, OH
| Stalling other customers, wow if I was one of those other customers I would find myself another ISP ASAP, I think your request is to vaque and to far fetch I mean really stalling other customers.
I mean if you gave me some sort of scenario realistic then we can work with that but right now you are not even in left field but off the planet with those type of request, and I am not trying to poke fun at you. If you wanted to have certain protocols prioritized like http, ftp , streaming video or something like that great. But what it sounds like you are looking for is a certain upload or garuantee on upstream bandwidth which almost all isp's offer in their SLA's of course we are talking business circuits like t1's, ds3's, oc3's and such. You make it sound like you just want any of your upload traffic to be prioritzed outbound well that is all fine but once it hits that first backbone hop all bets are off because there is no or very little of traffic management being done on the backbone to much over head. Why is this important because your traffic can be prioritized on the porivders network but how much of your traffic is just going to STAY on the providers network and not hit the backbone or some other ISP's network whom is not doing QOS. One of the gotcha's for QOS is, it has to be done start to finish. |
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