Okay, someone asked me for this a while back and I promised them I'd get back to them once I'd updated to 4.8. Still haven't updated, so apologies for that.
This may well be an abomination to the pf Gods, but it works for me. On 2 March 2011 00:37, Michael Grigoni <michael.grig...@cybertheque.org> wrote: > On 1 Mar 2011 at 21:19, SJP Lists wrote: > >> With my link at about 12Mbit/S worth of web traffic and altq keeping >> my VoIP calls nice and clean, my Soekris 5501 with OpenBSD 4.6 hovers >> around 85% idle. > > Would you please describe what you do for inbound traffic shaping / > rate limiting; do you route through a loopback interface and do outbound Like you mention below with the lack of end-to-end QoS, since I don't control the upstream router I also don't do anything for inbound traffic shaping, since by the time a packet is received at my firewalls end of the last mile, it is too late to control the bandwidth that was now already used. It's history by the time my firewall knows about it. I realise I can shape it on the way out of an internal interface and thereby slow down the follow-up packets in the flow, assuming a well behaved non-malicious remote host, but I don't bother. That is something I'd like to play with if I can ever find the time. > shaping? VoIP is such a compromise for voice quality when there is > no national end-to-end QoS on IP traffic -- and to think that Obama's > FCC is/was seriously proposing VoIP as a mandate? Gads! It never > ceases to amaze me what people will settle for in voice link quality -- > cell phones' convenience seems to have destroyed expectations of > uninterrupted and clear voice channels and VoIP may work most of > the time but just wait until you are in an important conversation with > a client and suddenly you sound like a Klingon, or the echo sounds > like the traffic was routed to the moon and back or dropouts and > resulting predictive reconstruction makes you sound like a Munchkin -- > or worse, the data is lost (all this still happens on cell phones too) > I find myself warning the other party at the start of every conversation > that I am on a VoIP link. Day to day, I forget that I'm a VoIP user until a balance reminder email comes through telling me that I still have 9 months or so of credit to go. Audio quality for me with G.729(a?) is as good as or better than a land line and it is consistent, regardless of how busy my link is. And my yearly phone bill is half of just my old telco's line rental for the year! Before even considering the call costs that came on top of that. That VoIP cost includes local, mobile and interstate calls (little to no international, although that's cheap too). > -- what we're they thinking???? > > Anyway, whatever altq approaches that have worked for you would > be great to know... > > Michael The most important thing I found, was to measure your upstream bandwidth to have a starting point to work down from to see at what point altq starts to work. The point here is to avoid saturation. I find that point and then move down a bit more to build in some margin for link performance fluctuation. You are trading a little off your maximum speed to gain a lot of control. I was performing multiple simultaneous FTP uploads and downloads while testing VoIP calls. I employ Empty ACK prioritisation as Daniel details at: http://www.benzedrine.cx/ackpri.html which seems to give the feel of doubling my link performance as far as interactivity goes. For the portion of my upstream bandwidth I dedicate to realtime applications such as VoIP and fast paced gaming, I do not allow other queues to borrow from. So I'm giving up even more speed from regular traffic to reserve to the realtime apps. Might seem like overkill, but I'm happy with my general usage download speed of 11-12Mbit/S and would not want to add a little to that to have a crappy phone service. My queues can be found at: http://www.flashbsd.net/altq BTW, having ADSL2+ Annex M with about 2.3Mbit/S upstream helps. And my ISP (Internode) is super reliable too. In more than 3 years I've only noticed 2 or 3 outages and each time they only lasted minutes. Cheers, Shane
