On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 20:01 -0400, Brandon Kim wrote: > What about purchasing a low-end packetshaper to be used in between?
If - 1/ budget is a problem and 2/ you have no BSD knowledge inhouse and 3/ the LAN side is all ethernet you could have a stab at using a PFsense box with two (and strictly ONLY two, for this use) physical NICs. It has a GUI to set up traffic shaping (see the sticky on the pfsense forums) PFsense 1.2.3 is current, don't go for the experimental 2.0 for production. There's a book and commercial support if you need it, free support via forums if you can't. Only two physical NICs is necessary due to shaper problems with more than two, whereas in a firewalling role the slots are the only limit (but VLANS are the norm for bucketloads of ports on a firewall PFsense box) An ITX (Littlefalls etc) mobo with 512MB RAM with an extra PCI Intel NIC added will do you fine . PFsense has nice traffic graphs, which helps you with shaping speeds in a big way. It also has a TFTP server available for it so it's handy for unmanned sites with only a few blue boxes ;) PS - a crazy afterthough - surely just about anything with a 10/100 ethernet link running at 100 and placed inline, cannot exceed 100Mbps - and probably less if it's plastic-cased? Try a few 8-port junkers and see what happens if you fancy a walk on the dangerous side. Watch out for errors and smoke :) Gord -- The drinker you are the smoker you get
