4.8-Stable DummyNet

[Max Khon]

hi, there!

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 03:35:08PM -0600, Mike Porter wrote:

> > Hi.  We just opened a gaming center and have chosen to run a FreeBsd box
> > for our firewall.  IPFW is configured at it's very basic running natd
> > through rl0 and allowing any to any connections from the lan to the outer
> > world.  Natd controls access to the lan.
> >
> > We have a 6.0 mb/s ADSL net connection for all the gaming clients to use,
> > however if a gamer starts downloading a file, that file takes precendence
> > and causes everyone's pings 'in-game' to sky rocket to unplayable levels. 
> > I have done some reading on DummyNet which is attached at the hip with
> > IPFW, however I have been unsuccessful in getting it to work properly.
> >
> > I have done some research and found this site:
> > http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/
> >
> > After reading I became more confused than before.  Should I share the link
> > as a whole to all 64 client machines OR should I set a fixed BW for all
> > client machines.  Are there other websites out there that can help with
> > this?
> >
> > Also if and when I do find a working pipe/queue config do I put it before
> > the natd via rl0 command or after?
> 
> Another consideration, from experience:  rl is not a very good "inside" nic, 
> at least if running with the old standby 8139 chip.  I don't have direct 
> experience with the 82xx family they are using these days, but with my 
> 8139-based card, I could never, under windows, get a single download past 
> 30KBps (but I could open 3 downloads before the performance started to fall 
> off) (this is on a cable modem).  Under BSD (4-stable in the days of 4.5 and 
> 4.6) I couldn't get anything past 100Kbps.  Using a machine with two 
> realtek's as a gateway/router, I found I was brealy better than dialup on my 
> local machines.  Switching to a Netgear NIC (dc driver) vastly improved 
> matters.  When set for dc0=outside, rl0=inside, my LAN performance is about 
> the same (indicating a bottleneck in rl0), however, my WAN performance is 
> about 1/3 better (I can consistently get 130KBps+, and frequently exceed 
> 200KBps; once in a while I can even get more than 300KBps, but due to the 
> nature of cable, that is pretty rare.).  Putting dc0 on "inside" duty more 
> than doubles the performance of my LAN, without changing any network 
> infrastructure.  This tells me the rl8139 at least is optimized for use on 
> asymetric connection, such as DSL or Cable, and is not really (even though it 
> claims to support it) a full-duplex card.  Spend a few dollars more, and get 
> a better card, in other words.

I have performance problems with these cards under win2000
(probably poorly written driver) but under FreeBSD 
I get 10Mb/s (megabytes/s) via NFS between two FreeBSD
machines (two 8139c cards, crossover).

/fjoe