Linux Networking HOWTO - DocBook Rev .02 | ||
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The traffic shaper is a driver that creates new interface devices, those devices are traffic-limited in a user-defined way, they rely on physical network devices for actual transmission and can be used as outgoing routed for network traffic.
The shaper was introduced in Linux-2.1.15 and was backported to Linux-2.0.36 (it appeared in 2.0.36-pre-patch-2 distributed by Alan Cox, the author of the shaper device and maintainer of Linux-2.0).
The traffic shaper can only be compiled as a module and is configured by the shapecfg program with commands like the following:
shapecfg attach shaper0 eth1 shapecfg speed shaper0 64000 |
The shaper device can only control the bandwidth of outgoing traffic, as packets are transmitted via the shaper only according to the routing tables; therefore, a ``route by source address'' functionality could help in limiting the overall bandwidth of specific hosts using a Linux router.
Linux-2.2 already has support for such routing, if you need it for Linux-2.0 please check the patch by Mike McLagan, at ftp.invlogic.com. Refer to Documentationnetworking/shaper.txt for further information about the shaper.
If you want to try out a (tentative) shaping for incoming packets, try out rshaper-1.01 (or newer), from ftp.systemy.it.