PF inadequacy: queue download - bit.listserv.openbsd-pf

Message from discussion PF inadequacy: queue download

Karl O. Pinc

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More options Apr 30 2006, 2:12 am

Newsgroups: bit.listserv.openbsd-pf

From: k...@meme.com (Karl O. Pinc)

Date: 29 Apr 2006 09:12:08 -0700

Local: Sun, Apr 30 2006 2:12 am

Subject: Re: PF inadequacy: queue download

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On 04/29/2006 08:05:47 AM, kestas....@gmail.com wrote:

> "Note that queueing is only useful for packets in the outbound
> direction.
> But this is wrong. It's not too late to queue it; by queueing it and
> dropping some packets of inbound traffic the sending host slows down
> the speed at which it sends.

It's a question of what's "useful". Not useful against
a malicious agent, but useful for traffic shaping regardless.

I'd promised some benchmarks to demonstrate this quite some time
ago, but just have not been able to get to it. In the meantime
I've had to set up an entirely separate box, a bridge
with only 2 interfaces, just to get inbound queueing. :-(
I'm doing VOIP, and in practice inbound queueing definately works.
However, I've still flakey voip issues that I haven't
worked out and so have not been willing to report anything.
To support inbound queueing for voip in a really
elegent fashion you probably want additional semantics
in the queue so you can always have enough free bandwidth
to handle another call and don't have to just
throttle data way back just in case there's lots of
voip traffic. But that's yet another issue....

Karl <k...@meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

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