I recently was forced to install a QOS pluggin for my IPcop firewall. For those not familiar with IPcop it is a Linux based distribution that is designed as a firewall. There are others out there like Smoothwall, CLark Connect, Endian and so on. I chose IPcop for it’s support for USB NICs.
Recently a friend of mine decided to go to China for a spell and I gave him free access to my FTP Server. I understand that he gets bored from time to time so I’m more then happy to share my bandwidth and server. The problem so far has been that his downloading is capping my network upload speed effectively bringing my network to a halt. This is where QOS comes in to play.
Now I know that good FTP servers have a bandwidth limiting feature already built in to them. Well I don’t have one of those. I’m using a Thecus N4100 with FTP support enabled. The Thecus is a NAS server that’s just hanging out on my network. I’m lucky that I even get FTP support so I can’t complain to much. I guess I could always setup FTP on my Web server and just mount the remote folders on the network but I digress.
QOS stands for Quality of Service and is a resource control mechanism. This allows for greater control of traffic and packet shaping. I should now be able to limit FTP transfers to only 80% of my total upload and leave the rest for web transactions.
There is plenty of information on the net if you Google “QOS.” For those with IPcop you can pick up the plugin over at mhaddons. You’ll also need the plugin for Layer7. This is also at mhaddons. When installing don’t forget to install layer7 first.
There is a great guide for setting up QOS on IPcop here. It’s incredibly helpful.
I’ll have to see how this works out and if I can notice an increase in performance on my end while my friend is downloading.
It was recently brought to my attention that thebreastcancersite.com is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on ‘donating a mammogram’ for free (pink window in the middle).