I have had my share of frustrations with this traffic shaper and VPN is one of them. My VPN connection completely ignores any shaper rules for whatever reason. In fact it ignores my ISP's speed cap as well. A normal upload for me is about 720kbps, but my VPN connection bounces between 520's and 1100's on a regular basis. This is observed using monomon so that may be an issue, but tis strange anyway. I can tell the shaper that I only have 300kbps of upload, but the VPN will act the same as always. Maybe someone else can tell you about shaping VPN traffic.  All I know is that it won't listen to my rules. I only want to make sure I have enough upload for my voip calls, but when the competing traffic is over the VPN I can't win. UPDATE –------------------------------ After messing with it for a while, I was able to get my voip to work when there is uploading going on, but when there isn't a voip call in progress the VPN still ignores the limit set on the traffic shaper.

Things like that will never be controllable I think as you never know the current limit of the line.

My phones also set the QOS/TOS Bit 3 (LowDelay) and i can't deactivate it couse the switches should also prefer these packets in front of all other packets. May be for me is the solution to deactivate the default ACK Queue (cause it seems that it catches all Lowdelays before any of my rule are proceded?) and set up a ACK queue manually (without Lowdelay) and create rule to feed all the acks to this queue and also a special queue/rule with lowdelay for VoIP …?!?! I think i'll try this at home first - thanks for the hint!

Well I have tryed adjusting all of that but to no avail.  The VPN traffic that I have selected doesn't do to well ether.  I am finding it difficult on how the GUI setting work.

I can honestly say that this works well. I had the same problem…..a moment of stutter than voice was okay but rather annoying. I did 400Kb and 5000ms and the problem went away. Thanks for the tip.

@dusan: Realtime curve should be used only for realtime applications. Don't use it for FTP and HTTP. Use Linkshare curve instead. (Or simply set Bandwidth while the Linkshare fields are left blank.) can you describe this better. realtime seems to work well for http etc. if you want four queues 10 Mb bandwidth http  max download 10Mb priority 5 ftp    max download 8Mb priority 4 vpn    max 5 Mb high priority 6 all_other max 10 Mb priority 2 p2p  max 2 Mb priority 1 how would you laythis out then we presently use realtime for caps and this seems to work ok

I've been experimenting with this for quite some time now, and it seems as though the streaming starts messing up qwandef hits 2Mbit. If i cap it here (realtime m2 at 2Mb) it works nicely. Now this is all good and shiny, but with the streaming using 1.5Mb and the rest of the network using 2Mb (all upstream values here), im not really using my 10Mbit pipe to its fullest now am I? Any ideas as to how i can use the rest of my bandwidth without botching the streaming? //Richard.

@joustin: It doesn't help in any way. Skype configuration allows you to specify INCOMING connection port (as to configure proper port forwarding on router). It doesn't have anything to do with connecting out to the world. Shaping per IP is useless, as skype client is never the only net client on a pc workstation. Still not resolved. I'll be probably falling to some "real" voip solution, dumping skype (toy), as it is too problematic even in small business environment. I tend to disagree. The port specification seems to work for the both because I can see skype in both my VoIP up AND down queues. If you are looking for a business-class service, then skype is definitely not what you're looking for anyways. Riley

Aw durn.  :'( Well I'm either installing m0n0wall or waiting for this functionality in the next release of pfSense!

Ok! Thx for the answer. I'll be waiting for this feature.

@mrt_ok: hi guys, please let me know when do you start to solve the transparent shaper issues. I´d like to contribute if my old PHP and firewall know how can help. i had to tell my customer to timeshift the decision a bit - so there is a chance to place pfsense again - cause I think it´s a great project ! in case of a deal i´d like to donate - of cause! kind regards, mrt_ok http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,2686.0.html

The answer to my own question is no. I need a transparent traffic shaper to do these things. Pfsense doesn't seem to support this at the moment. However I was able to setup m0n0wall as a transparent traffic shaper.

Really strange….

Thanks, I'll try some of the suggestions and let ya'll know what happened.

Maybe you need some other order of your rules. They are applied top down.

You can't reuse these config as pfSense doesn't use iptables. However the pfSense shaper can work in a similiar way when set up correctly. I suggest just trying to setup pfSense and running the wizard. Then just see what rules it does create and what options you have.

see http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,1686.msg9789.html#msg9789 for a list of network interfaces  that support altq

Try the default low priority flag first. If this doesn't work set some provider like "asterisk". This will setup rules based on ports. After the wizard went through edit the voip rules it created and alter the ports to what your phones/voipserver uses.

We fixed a condition with 1.0-RELEASE where under certain circumstances rules were not applied after hitting apply. You should upgrade to the release version.