A colorful grey world

Traffic Control on Linux

Years ago, I had to shape some traffic at the office—I don’t even remember why.

I do remember how painful that was. The tools (iproute2) were quite new, and the documentation was excessively terse.

Recently I rebuilt my whole home network (essentially 2 “servers”, one dual core 3800+, the other single 3500+) with OpenVZ virtual servers: one for the telephony using Asterisk, one for the network configuration (DNS, …), one for general linux development, one for …, …

My home network is plugged on the internet using a Videotron cable modem. Good downloads (~ 1MB/s), good uploads (~ 100KB/s), very poor download/upload mix. So I punched myself into looking at the traffic shaping tools available in Linux, again.

Amazing how things have changed! There’s actually good documentation here! And the HTB qdisc is so much understandable when compared to CBQ (the only thing I had the last time I looked at all this)!

Anyway, now that my queues are managed by my router instead of my provider, uploading something doesn’t jam up everything, it barely has any effect on my pings, and I can still browse, check my mail, and speak over the phone :) I can finally prioritize services in a manageable way!

Another nice thing I should’ve looked (again) years ago. Life is full of discoveries!