Hello all. Once upon a time, in the earlyish days of 802.11b and long before anyone was selling wireless DSL gateways, I ate both pcmcia slots on a thinkpad running debian with a wireless card and an ethernet card, convinced the machine to forward packets, set up a DHCP server, struggled with ipchains and such for security, and finally eventually achieved a reasonably working setup for my home wireless LAN. However, I did not particularly enjoy the process, nor was I ever satisfied with the robustness. I've since left that residence and in so doing moved on to beautiful dedicated hardware that requires nothing more from me than a few moments configuration and flipping a switch. A linksys wireless router now costs about what a wifi card does, never mind the computer I had to have attached to it to do everything else. And it handles everything I need from it perfectly without any complaint and without every flailing. EXCEPT: it doesn't prioritize ssh traffic. So that means I spend my life floating in and out of buzzkill mode as various bulk downloads and uploads saturate the link and smother my remote sessions with latency. Today the wondershaper was pointed out to me, and a finer teaser I've never seen: http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ Before, without wondershaper, while uploading: round-trip min/avg/max = 2041.4/2332.1/2427.6 ms After, with wondershaper, during 220kbit/s upload: round-trip min/avg/max = 15.7/51.8/79.9 ms MY QUESTION: do I have any chance of taking advantage of this without junking my nice simple dedicated easy-to-configure hardware? I know that it's technically possible to build and configure a linux machine to bridge the wireless and wired LANs, run DHCP/DNS, speak PPPoE to the DSL modem, NAT the internal machines, etc. etc. etc. and then I could do traffic shaping directly on that. But learning the ins and outs of all that software is simply not appealing. I have other priorities now. I do have a dedicated linux machine hardwired to the linksys, but it has no wireless hardware (and no easy opportunity, it's a specialized U1 server) so even if I was willing to go down this road I'd need a new box. But I'm not. Please don't think that I'm lazy, or ungrateful for all the wonderful things open source has added to my life. I am neither. There just comes a point where diving into another project like this no longer appeals compared to working on my genuine interests. Any tips/insight greatly appreciated, even if it's only that it's going to be impossible without junking the linksys and switching to a linux machine, which is what I expect... I'm just hoping I'm failing to see or understand something. If only one of the home wireless gateway vendors saw a demand for traffic shaping -- but I think most home users are too latency tolerant because they manipulate almost all their data locally. Wouldn't it be cool if hacked firmware for the linksys that did traffic shaping just materialized out of nowhere? I think I'll go wish on an open source star tonight! Somewhat hopefully, -- Paul Phillips | It's better to have gloved and tossed than never to Stickler | have played baseball. Empiricist | pull his pi pal! |----------* http://www.improving.org/paulp/ *----------
