Dynamic Traffic Shaping
Hello, all. This thread is response to this exchange with Alberto about
the new and fabulous Debian Adminstrator's handbook:
> I went to the
> >
http://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.quality-of-service.html
> > page simply because it was an area where I had done a lot of work
lately
> > to develop a dynamic traffic shaper to conform to percentile
billing.
> btw, what is this dynamic traffic shapper you are talking about? ive
> been after something like that for a long time in linux.. Something
> similar to what netlimiter is able to do in windows world....
>
> The only thing ive been able to find similar is trickle and nethogs
but
> they certainly have limitations
>
We started receiving overage charges from our collocation center. We
knew our average usage was way below our Committed Information Rate but
they had moved to 95th percentile billing. We assumed it would be easy
to find something that would help us shape traffic accordingly and, to
our surprise, didn't find anything. Since I just happened to be
researching HFSC and IFB interfaces at the time for another project
(integrating Endian UTMs into Firepipes - a replacement for firewalls
based upon the ISCS network security project -
http://iscs.sourceforge.net), we decided to create our own called
pShaper.
pShaper is fresh out of the oven so we don't have a web site for it yet
nor have we yet released it on SourceForge. We have been selling it as
a service because the most complicated part of it all is the in-depth
analysis of the traffic patterns more than actually setting up pShaper.
It is basically a set of quite a number of complex bash scripts which
collect network I/O samples at a given rate, analyzes those samples
according to any number of percentile billing methods, calculates the
given percentile (typically 95th), compares the current utilization to
the current percentile, and, if it crosses the threshold in either
direction shifts from burst mode to limited mode or vice versa by
dynamically changing the HFSC classes.
We will probably try to commercialize it to recover our investment but,
as we are a shop firmly committed to open source, we will also most
likely release the full source as an open source project. I don't know
when that will be as we are already in the process of commercializing
our ShrinkMail project as a server side solution to send unlimited sized
email attachments via email from any OS and any device, our SimplicITy
project to provide what we call Content Networks - basically a dramatic
step forward in cloud storage which moves not only content consumption
to the cloud but content creation, collaboration, and communication, and
we already have Firepipes so, I'm not sure how much management attention
pShaper will get. If someone is interested in partnering with us, let
us know. Hope that explains it without being too much of an infomercial
but we're very enthusiastic about our open source children :) I hope it
proves helpful - John
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