I need the opposite of a Limiter? Guarenteed min BW on each VLAN
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I have a Netgate 1100 with a 10Mb/s symmetrical WAN. I have several VLANs trunked over the LAN port. Most of the VLANs have a host that is streaming audio or video. Others are for email, web browsing, etc.
The streaming hosts are not well-behaved. If they need to stream at 1 or 2 Mb/s, they will try to burst the full 10 Mb/s, saturating the WAN connection and starving the other hosts enough that playback is interrupted.
I have solved this by putting limiters on each VLAN interface that limit to the maximum sustained bitrate needed to stream the content. On the email/web VLAN, I limit it to what remains of the 10 Mb/s.
This is working but the 10 Mb/s is statically allocated. If one of the streaming VLANs is paused, for example, it's bandwidth could be used for email/web.
So, is there a better way to do this? It's as though I need the opposite of a limiter, something that guarantees a minimum throughput for a VLAN.
(This is for a trade show exhibit, a 10 Mb/s connection is $6000 for four days of use, so just buying a bigger connection is not an option)
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Honestly, I've never used limiters. But just remembered I've recently read they can be dynamically created per IP or subnet basis. Maybe this feature can help.
From the pfsense doc:
When a limiter is set for Source Address or Destination Address, the pipe bandwidth limit will be applied on a per-IP address basis or a subnet basis, depending on the masking bits, using the direction chosen in the masking.
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/trafficshaper/limiters.html#creating-limiters
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My first though would be to separate networks possibly getting a cell router to do the duty of the traffic that does not need the 10mb connection.. if that is possible..
My second thought is whether or not your client devices have QOS available?
Limit the streaming services but then set their QOS high. Purely theory with me at this point however..
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I was reading some documentation on altq, but don't know enough to see if this is possible: Set a bandwidth limit for each streaming VLAN and a high priority. Then the email VLAN would get any bandwidth left over.
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@rb625 traffic shaper can do this
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/trafficshaper/altq-scheduler-types.html#hierarchical-fair-service-curve-hfsc
I’ve not used HFSC but there are tutorials online.CBQ has limits and “borrowing” but I had some challenges getting it to work. IIRC one has to set borrowing on the parent queue as well.
