ISP bandwidth/traffic shaper advice?

["R.M. Evers" <debian@hbh-it.nl>]

hi everyone,

i work for a small ISP, and not too far from now, we are going to move
all our colo- and web-servers to another datacenter/colocator. when
doing this, i would like to add a traffic shaper to our configuration.
now, i'm not exactly what you would call a networking guru, so i find
this pretty difficult. i was searching for an easy-to-manage hardware
appliance, but not with much luck. i've heard suggestions to create a
'bridge' using either debian w/ qos or freebsd w/ dummynet. i would
prefer to do this with debian, because i know nothing of bsd, and do
practically everything with debian since it's my favorite dist. the
setup would be something like the following (we've got one routable IP
C-class, say 1.2.3.0/24):


           colo internet connection
                     |
                     |
           bandwidth shaping bridge
                 ??? IP ???
                     |
                     |
                   switch
                     |
                     |
    ---------------------------------------
    |            |          |             |
 ourcolo1     ourcolo2     web1          web2   ..etc
1.2.3.100    1.2.3.101    1.2.3.102   1.2.3.103


there may be things missing from this nice ascii art.
if so, please let me know :-).

does anyone have any suggestions on how i should go about this? does it
matter what IP the bridge has? does anyone know of any good
documentation which covers this kind of setup, or what software i should
use?

i would be forever grateful :-)

kind regards,
-rodi.