The traffic shaper is a driver that creates new interface devices. Those devices are traffic-limited in a user-defined way. They rely on physical network devices for actual transmission, and they can be used as outgoing routed for network traffic.
The shaper was introduced in Linux-2.1.15, and it was backported to Linux-2.0.36 (it appeared in 2.0.36-pre-patch-2 distributed by Alan Cox, the author of the shaper device and maintainer of Linux-2.0).
The traffic shaper can only be compiled as a module. It is configured by the shapecfg program. The commands are similar to the following:
shapecfg attach shaper0 eth1
shapecfg speed shaper0 64000
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The shaper device can only control the bandwidth of outgoing traffic (as packets are transmitted via the shaper; only according to the routing tables). A ``route by source address'' functionality could help in limiting the overall bandwidth of specific hosts using a Linux router.
Linux-2.2 already has support for such routing. If you need it for Linux-2.0 please check the patch by Mike McLagan at ftp.invlogic.com. Refer to Documentationnetworking/shaper.txt for further information about the shaper.
If you want to try out a (tentative) shaping for incoming packets, try out rshaper-1.01 (or newer) from ftp.systemy.it. Was this section helpful? Why not Donate $2.50?