bandwidth limiting

[Peter Corlett]

On 10 Sep 2006, at 09:51, Paul wrote:
[...]
> Wouldn't be much better to use traffic control tc, HTB, ESFQ +  
> iptables -j MARK on linux or BSD dummynet or PF?

Apart from neither working on OSX, once you get past all the Web 2.0  
bollocks you will find that podcasts are basically just a few files  
dumped on a website.

Now, you *could* have a separate firewalling box that rate-limits  
downloads that are large media files, but pf/iptables don't have the  
smarts for that - you'll be wanting to have the firewalling box go a  
bit higher up the protocol stack and run Squid, and pf/iptables as a  
sledgehammer to ensure all traffic goes through Squid.

I'd generally advocate a Squid transproxy on a domestic connection  
with more than one computer anyway. Never mind the bandwidth savings,  
it really does improve performance, especially with those dumb apps  
that like to download honking great files and ignore your proxy  
settings.

(I note for example that the Debian, and thus Ubuntu, installer  
doesn't give you an opportunity to set a proxy before it goes and  
downloads several tens of megs from security.debian.org, or in  
Ubuntu's case, several hundred megs.)