It seems like there are always questions and/or complaints on this list, so I just wanted to share a success story.
We just returned (this weekend) from running the PC gaming network at Penny Arcade eXpo's west coast event. This is a rather high profile event attended by 60,000+ people, with the PC gaming room being divided into two sections - PC Freeplay, with Intel powered machines donated by Intel themselves, and BYOC, which is more like a regular LAN party where people bring their own rigs. They both share a common internal network (/22) so that they can play games with eachother. One of the major issues this event has always faced is bandwidth. The convention center's bandwidth is extraordinarily expensive, so the event is only able to afford a 45Mbps connection (for 500-600 gaming PC's). This connection has to support regular web browsing, email, IM, etc, as well as game traffic AND game patch traffic (ala Steam and Battle.NET). Further complicating matters, at some points, there are also video streams and tournaments with real money riding on them, which have to run smoothly. Up till now, this has always been accomplished with traffic shaper rules, but these are complex, and difficult to explain to others. They're also not easy to adjust in an adhoc manner. This year, we tried out the bandwidth limiter feature, and basically created different buckets for the protocols and ports we wanted to allow. This made it extremely easy to make sure that there was ALWAYS bandwidth available for the PC attached to a projector showing a video stream, and that the people playing in the Starcraft 2 tournament had enough bandwidth to log on. It was easy to tweak and adjust as the demands evolved. So, to whoever built that feature- THANK YOU! My one bit of feedback: The 'Limiter Info' page is currently *very* hard to decipher. It would be quite nice if there was a readily available breakdown (maybe in graph form, too?) of the different limiters and their utilization. But again, thank you. This, and the layer-7 rules, rock! Pics (apologies for the shameless plug - it's the only location that I have them available at): http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150348477738933.398042.102500853932 PS - you can't see it due to the contrast, but on the picture with the rack and monitor, that monitor was showing the realtime bandwidth utilization (the SVG graph thingy), and people seemed to think that was pretty neat! PPS - Oh, here's one where you CAN see it, kinda: http://hphotos-snc7.fbcdn.net/322411_10150348722388933_102500853932_9609136_7921564_o.jpg Best Regards, Nathan Eisenberg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
