What kind of recommendations are there for automatically polling network
capacity and adjusting PF's AltQ accordingly?
At work, MSFters have gotten into the routers and have even made a nest
in the cellar. How much gopher gas is needed to clear out the nest and
what can be done to keep them from moving back in? The space is about
40m^2 with standard ceilings and there seems to be about a half dozen.
Due to various managerial and technical problems on some of the networks
one of my labs must currently cross, throughput seems to vary between
2Kb/s and 4Mb/s.
A workaround, while figuring out how to deal with the nest, is to use
AltQ. AltQ on PF works absolutely great so long as the limits placed by
AltQ match the actual network conditions.
However, I get poor performance if my cap is higher than what the other
networks can deal with. And, obviously, if I throttle unnecessarily,
then that's not optimal either.
For example if the capacity is 3Mb/s then throttling at 3Mb/s seems to
give good performance. But if the capacity is 2Mb/s, then throttling at
3Mb/s appears like it might be making slowness worse.
bw_ext="3Mb" # max external capacity
. . .
altq on $ext_if cbq bandwidth $bw_ext \
queue { main, ftp, ssh, sewage }
. . .
The nest seems to be interfering with regular ping and probably soon
with traceroute. What are good ways to poll the network's capacity and
adjust PF?
Regards
-Lars
