Limiting my own network throughput

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 10:23 -0400, Scott J. Henson wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Here at work we have a fairly fat network pipe, shared amongst 100+
> > people. The local BOFH would prefer it if I didn't max out the pipe with
> > daily updates :-) He's a friend and doesn't want micro-manage the
> > network so he trusts me to do the right thing  .
> > 
> > I can live with updates coming through at 2kB/sec or thereabouts and
> > mail/web coming through at full speed. What would be the easiest way to
> > implement this kind of network throttling where it's still under my
> > control?
> > 
> > alan
> > 
> > 
> 
> I think what you want is qos queuing.  I prefer shorewall to 
> manage my firewalling rules.  As such I would recommend 
> looking at the following webpage.
> http://www.shorewall.net/traffic_shaping.htm

I was hoping to not have to go there :-)

> I would think you would want to limit bandwidth to the 
> mirror you use.  Or you could limit what apt can use, though 
> using the dest would be easier.

The easiest would be to limit any package manager app, and be able to
switch it on or off. At home I want full bandwidth usage, and throttled
at work. I'd then default to on or off in the respective profiles.

What does apt* use to do it's downloading? 'ps axf' tells me
it's /usr/lib/apt/methods/*, so if I were to shape based on those
binaries, would I catch everything used by Ubuntu?


> Alternatively, if there are a lot of people using Ubuntu on 
> your network, you could have a local mirror you sync down to 
> and update against it.

Nope, sadly it's just me and one of the business unit managers at this
point :-(

alan