I am trying to do some traffic management on customer connections and we are having problems with queueing not behaving as expected.
I have setup a test environment to eliminate any external factors, this consists of 2 x RB433 running v3.14. The RB433s are connected together via Ethernet, the test machine is a Laptop running Windows XP connected to one end, downloading from/uploading to a Linux server connected to the other end.
The RBs’ Ethernet ports have been bridged and I am using Bridge Filtering to apply packet marks. This is for performance reasons so that we don’t use the Firewall, i.e. use-ip-firewall is disabled on the RBs.
Two Bridge filters have been implemented on the RB connected to the Linux server, one filter marks packets on ether1, the other on ether2. If you merely have one Bridge Filter doing the filtering on the Bridge itself, you get very strange results, I seem to get better results with two filters. Also we want to be able to control the upload and download bandwidth in different situations either separately or as an aggregation of the total traffic, i.e. we want to offer our customers either symmetric bandwidth up to a set ceiling in both directions or we want to offer an asymmetric service that will allow traffic up to a ceiling in both directions, but not at the same time. For example the first method could allow a full 4Mb/s in both directions at all times, the second method would allow a total of 4Mb/s, but that could be 3Mb/s upload and 1Mb/s download one minute and 1Mb/s upload and 3Mb/s download at a later time, the split of the bandwidth being automatically handled by the queue. Theoretically this should be possible, I just can’t seem to get it to work!
If I create a Simple Queue that checks for the packet marks on “all” interfaces it successfully throttles bandwidth on download, but not upload?! Why? Surely if all the packets are being marked and the queue is truly listening on all interfaces, the traffic direction should not matter.
In the bridges the packet counts seem to indicate that the packets are being marked and the monitor in the Simple Queue shows data in both directions for both download and upload tests, but it only limits the bandwidth when downloading.
This test bed is a simplification of what we’re doing in the production environment, where we are using a combination of VLANs and EoIP tunnels to segregate different customers’ traffic.
Regards
Chris Macneill