Per IP traffic shaping–share bandwith evenly between IP addresses??

foxale08 · Sep 17, 2013, 6:31 PM

I have attempted to document the process for a simple single lan single wan setup in screenshots. Click apply settings when presented with the option to do so. See if this does what you want.

foxale08 · Sep 17, 2013, 6:32 PM

continued

foxale08 · Sep 17, 2013, 6:33 PM

continued 2

foxale08 · Sep 17, 2013, 6:34 PM

continued 3

pfNoobNum9000 · Sep 28, 2013, 7:37 PM

Thanks foxale08! This setup seems to work great. Allows full bandwidth use if the connection is idle and splits it fairly if its not.

Worked great at a LAN party.

myke · Oct 14, 2013, 3:16 PM

Hi,

I tried this setup on pfsense 2.1 but it seems to be the same way with and without the limiter.

The bandwith is not separetely equally for each computer.

I'm not sure it's working correctly.

Ermal,

I found a post of you on the mailing list :

http://lists.pfsense.org/pipermail/list/2011-December/000980.html

is this post ?

Best regards.
Myke.

georgeman · Oct 15, 2013, 10:15 PM

Even if it can be manually configured with the limiters, the checkbox looks indeed as one of "the best checkboxes ever created".

+1 to add this functionality to pfSense in a future version :)

Anyway I will try to configure it as indicated by foxale08 and report back my findings. Maybe at least we can come up with a tutorial

Hercules201 · Oct 16, 2013, 10:21 AM

@blablablablabla:

@foxale08:

Pfsense has equivalent functionality with limiters.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Traffic_Shaping_Guide#Limiter

Limiters assign bandwidth to IP addresses. This means that I can't use the whole pipe if nobody else is using the connection. I originally used PFSense with limiters but everyone got pissed that their internet was only 1/10 the speed all the time. m0n0wall dynamically assigns bandwidth based on use. 90% of the time you get the whole connection, it only slows down when someone else is also using it.

That CAN NOT be the problem The computers connected with 1Gb/s nowadays trying to send it to router/modem with usually no more than 10-100Mbit will cause latency issues. That is what you want to fix. Unfortunately pfSense trafficshaping DOES NOT WORK. Because it would have fixed the problem if you limited trafic to 9Mbit or whatever and then ALL QOS ENABLED devices you have obeyed it. If you DON'T HAVE QoS enabled devices like LINUX, BSD, OSX then it DOES NOT WORK!!!(and that's why monowall ip based is a very good solution). If QoS is not CORRECTLY IMPLEMENTED in pfSense it WILL NOT WORK.

PLEASE FLAME ME ON THIS IF YOU CAN

georgeman · Oct 16, 2013, 9:59 PM

What?? The traffic shaper works, and works great. It could get somewhat tricky to properly configure if you lack the proper knowledge, but it works. It doesn't matter if the devices are QoS aware or not. Queueing occurs at the router

foxale08 · Oct 23, 2013, 11:04 PM

@Hercules201:

@blablablablabla:

@foxale08:

Pfsense has equivalent functionality with limiters.

http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Traffic_Shaping_Guide#Limiter

Limiters assign bandwidth to IP addresses. This means that I can't use the whole pipe if nobody else is using the connection. I originally used PFSense with limiters but everyone got pissed that their internet was only 1/10 the speed all the time. m0n0wall dynamically assigns bandwidth based on use. 90% of the time you get the whole connection, it only slows down when someone else is also using it.

That CAN NOT be the problem The computers connected with 1Gb/s nowadays trying to send it to router/modem with usually no more than 10-100Mbit will cause latency issues. That is what you want to fix. Unfortunately pfSense trafficshaping DOES NOT WORK. Because it would have fixed the problem if you limited trafic to 9Mbit or whatever and then ALL QOS ENABLED devices you have obeyed it. If you DON'T HAVE QoS enabled devices like LINUX, BSD, OSX then it DOES NOT WORK!!!(and that's why monowall ip based is a very good solution). If QoS is not CORRECTLY IMPLEMENTED in pfSense it WILL NOT WORK.

PLEASE FLAME ME ON THIS IF YOU CAN

Some of what you are saying is correct. Latency occurs where bottlenecks are present, the limiter is an artificial bottleneck. QOS can control latency and delivery priority but only at points designed to do so. QOS can only effectively control latency for higher priority packets. As far as I know, the pipe based limiters discussed in this thread are content agnostic, basically they don't care about QOS. It's not so much as the limiters don't work, they work as designed, just not the way you thought they did. It might be possible to use the QOS aware traffic shaper and the limiters on the same firewall rule such that the traffic shaper has limits set at the WAN max up/down, not to shape but to prioritize packet delivery to the pipe based limiter. This could work if packets are handled by the traffic shaper prior to being handled by the pipe based limiter and that the traffic shaper completely passes all packets in the highest priority queue before passing packets in sequentially lower queues.

If I had my way I would like to see the pipes use the ECN flag and be QOS aware.

blablablablabla · Mar 6, 2014, 8:29 AM

I'm back again to revive this thread from the dead :) . Still stuck on M0n0wall waiting for a reasonable solution to this.

Here is the issue:
With m0n0wall bandwidth is shared equally per ip when you check that box by dynamically creating a queue for each ip address.

it is NOT a limiter. Each person gets the whole pipe unless one or more IP's is trying to max it out, then it treats them as queues and transfers data fairly.
You can get a similar effect in PfSense by creating two queues of equal priority and assigning one to each IP address. However you must do this MANUALLY for each ip on lan.
For the life of me I cannot figure out how to get PfSense to do this without manually creating a queue for each ip address on the lan. This is a pain in the ass and not even possible with how many different devices I have on my network

For those of you that haven't tried the feature in M0n0wall I can say it is incredibly valuable. Without it our network would be completely unusable due to heavy bittorrent and netflix traffic. We upgraded our network repeatedly until our speed was 50 megabits down and no matter what somebody would be downloading a patch on WoW or Steam or streaming something and our ping would skyrocket to 1000+. Therefore no matter what the PfSense advantages are I cannot switch without such a feature. It would also be great for hotspots, keeping a single user from soaking up all the bandwidth without liimiting everyone to a low speed all the time.

ppplleeeaaseee show me how to do this. foxale08's solution doesn't seem to work and the post on the mailing list I found basically tells you how to limit each user to a certain bandwidth. I don't know how many people are on the network at any certain time so I cannot reliably set a limit per person to keep the link from saturating. Also it's quite a waste of an expensive 50 megabit connection when almost nobody is online

hbanko · Mar 26, 2014, 7:01 AM

I followed foxale08 tutotrial. Its actually quite simple.

For me it works perfectly (pfsense 2.1).

As soon as more than one user downloads something, you can see in the traffic graph how the bandwidth is split between them. With usual browsing its in the graph not so noticeable.

But it had an extreme positive impact for all users here. Our internet line is finally useable for everyone and browsing is now always fast!

bfts · Mar 28, 2014, 4:51 PM

@foxale08:

I have implemented exactly what your talking about by using two parent limiters (up and down) and creating three child queues under each (the child queues are for each of my three lan subnets. The upload child queues have a 'source address' mask set and the download queues have the 'destination address' mask set.) I set the default pass rules for said subnets to use their appropriate child queues.

I'd love to know how you figured it out with the 3 subnets as I need to accommodate 3 LANs too.

I'd like to evenly share between the 3 subnets and what gets to subnet X share that evenly between the 80+ users of that subnet.

EDIT:I set this up for one of my LANs as described by foxale08 but I'm quite sure this limits the whole traffic to the values set in the limiter on a global level, not on a per user base ???

Sifter · Apr 4, 2014, 3:06 PM

Since the default LAN rule is used to apply this speed limit, what happens if I want full speed to a transfer on my NAS between two computers on my LAN? Is the speed limit also imposed on that transfer? In that scenario, Id want full gigabit speed of the switch, not the imposed 20000 kbits.

bfts · Apr 12, 2014, 8:02 PM

Is this still working under 2.1.2? (or 2.1.1 for that matter)
For me it seems not to work properly anymore or maybe it is because I'm in a MultiWAN environment?
I have the limiter set for all my MultiWAN failover rules…

My limiter is set to 6 Mbit/s, though the traffic graph shows some constant 10 Mbps throughput.

Any Idea what I'm doing wrong?

orangetek · Apr 14, 2014, 1:50 AM

I just tried this on a single lan/wan 2.1.2 fresh install and it is flawless. It splits the bandwidth perfectly.

wcrowder · Apr 15, 2014, 9:54 PM

@foxale08:

I have attempted to document the process for a simple single lan single wan setup in screenshots. Click apply settings when presented with the option to do so. See if this does what you want.

Awesome! Seems to work well. Thanks very much.

Ashfaq · Apr 25, 2014, 5:00 PM

So its all good that total bandwidth is divided b/w the active users equally. now what if i want to go a step further and want to have a MINIMUM bandwidth for a specific IP or for a group-of-IPs-together and then divided the rest of the remaining bandwidth b/w the other active users: e.g:

total download is 4Mbps
total connected users 6
2 users are idle and the remaining 4 are downloading at full capacity so 4Mbps/4 users, each one gets 1Mbps
now the 2 idle also starts to download at full capacity so now 4Mbps/6 users, each one gets 682Kbps
now if i want 1 of the users to have minimum 1Mbps and the rest of the 5 gets equal share in remaining 3Mbps, so each of the 5 gets 614Kbps

is it possible ???

as far as i know limiters are used to upper bound, while queues are used for lower bound (min guaranteed), can we somehow use queues in combination with limiters to achieve that.

Update:
found this link https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Traffic_Shaping_Guide#Using_Limiters_for_Bandwidth_Guarantees
but i dont think this serves the purpose and this will probably not allow to use the entire bandwidth that is available to the guaranteed device. i think the guaranteed limit will be the upper limit for the devices.

Thanks
Ashfaq

sideout · Apr 28, 2014, 3:33 PM

I just tested Foxale's setup and it worked for me.

I made a rule on the LAN side before the any any allow all rule that said:

IF Protocol = TCP , Source = LAN , Destination = NOT LAN then Upload_LAN for out and Download_LAN for in.

I had 2 steam clients downloading and both would be balancing out. The first one always seemed to get a bit more bandwidth but it would keep them decently even.

Going to test this out this weekend at a 125person LAN party.

orangetek · May 1, 2014, 8:01 PM

I have taken this a bit further and implemented QOS using just limiters while retaining the equal bandwidth sharing. Not 100% sure it works properly but seems to be. I have ACK, DNS, ICMP, HTTP/S, and OTHER in 3 priority groups, High,Mid,Low with weights set on each child limiter. I tested it by setting upload and download speeds on the parent limiters to 1/4 of my upload/download speed. I then proceeded to max both of them out while pinging an address on the internet. The pings remained steady like i wasn't even using any bandwidth. :)