Traffic Shaping with pf ...

[Matthew Grooms]

Max Laier wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 November 2005 23:18, Matthew Grooms wrote:
> 
>>      I have a couple of firewalls running freebsd 5.4 and pf and was
>>planning to use ALTQ for traffic shaping. But after doing a bit of
>>reading, it would seem that ALTQ only works on traffic passing outbound
>>on an interface. Since most of the traffic passing through my firewall
>>is http and ftp traffic, the inbound direction is the path being
>>saturated. Did I read the ALTQ documentation wrong or is there another
>>mechanism available for use with pf that could help me prioritize
>>bandwidth usage?
> 
> 
> You can not control inbound traffic!  You can not control what other people 
> sent to you!  It's impossible.  The only way to do it is to limit *outbound* 
> traffic on an upstream router.
> 

Max,

As always, thanks for your reply. Sounds like you may have heard this 
question once or twice ;) Sorry for being naive.

I understand what you are saying and this makes sense to me. But would 
it stand to reason that if you limit the rate of packets in a TCP stream 
that the windowing would slow the generation of traffic from the source 
host? I understand UDP is another animal all together.

Do pipes in ipfw only effect outbound traffic on an interface?

Thanks,

-Matthew