[plug] QoS and HTB

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

Just one for google.
My ISP appears to set up its ADSL lines using full bandwidth and just shapes upstream/downstream 
traffic. I have just spent several very frustrating days wondering why I could not get ssh traffic 
to properly steal traffic from my bulk queue using HTB.

It turns out that I did not have my outbound rate-limited enough. I have a 512/128 ADSL and I 
noticed I could comfortably send about 384k out sustained. (Measured using MRTG on a dedicated eth 
interface to the router). Based on this I rate limited the interface to about 300k and everything 
appeared to be working nicely, except I could not prioritise my traffic.

Long story short, it looks like I was sending buckets of traffic out, but the ISP was dropping 
packets like mad. After pulling my outbound down to 200k I now get a super low latency SSH 
connection (which I'm tunneling VNC over right now to send this E-mail) and everything is working 
swimmingly well.

When you actually get QoS working properly it's an absolute gem.

Ta to Cameron Patrick for his prior posts on QoS which proved invaluable when I needed to go back 
through my mail to get some tips.

All this came about as I'm now banned from bringing my Linux Laptop into the office (gotta love 
corporate policy) and I can't easily transfer my mail config onto my Windows Laptop (nor do I want 
to), so I needed a way of being able to VNC into my Laptop at home while still running 2 gnutella 
clients and a bittorent client on the same ADSL. It Rocks!

Regards,
Brad
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