Well, what an awesome month.
Diving back in over evenings this week, I found myself trying to deal more effectively with VoIP jitter, and inter-POP VPN latency, and international media sharing effectiveness.
Earlier this week, I stumbled on a new GPL tool .. MasterShaper .. via the good ‘ol Wikipedia under Traffic Shaping. In Debian it basically required a tarball dropped in the web document root and apt-cache pkgnames grep dependencieshere.Found good ‘ol nerim.net too! Great media support is back!.
Anyhow, after learning that IMQ patch allows some new interfaces just before or after the NAT stages (configurable) of the Netfilter engine, and reading about how HFSC has a guaranteed latency knob (for VoIP/Media anti-jitter), it became clear I could be making much better use of my bandwitch then plain old Wondershaper, WondershaperHTB-type scripts. (Which are great for non-jitter-sensitive data).
On another note, Evolution for Windows seems like a nice breather to personal groupware from foreign domains. Okay back to Work!
Install rant: Everything except the pear net_ipv4 module and the wondershaper tarball comes from packages, so it was straighforward and interesting to just snap together. Just remember to re-run the Mastershaper config if you are messing with your httpd.conf, (have the right Directory Options, and Alias for /icons there), and seems simplest if the docroot is one directory level higher than the mastershaper htdocs dir (w/ Config.dat / .htaccess).
Also found the ESFQ shaper, which help when multple connections might come from the same place (email servers, NAT’d networks). With ESFQ you can make sure that connections with big download and relatively small upload capability aren’t saturated when sending email to your big download pipe. TarPit is also sorta cool, as you can actually grep “CMD.EXE” > Tarpit with the Layer 7 matching, l7-protocol-filters.
