Making a slow link

P

Party2go9820

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 11, 2000
Messages
3,695
I know this is really backwards from what this forum normally sees, but there is method to my madness.

I'm about to get into a project involving several sites potentially connected with partial T1's and I was wondering if there is a way to simulate these slow links so I can do some testing in a lab environment before going live.

Is there an easy way to throttle the speeds down to simulate a 512k or 768k speed link? Obvously free and cheap would be better than expensive, but testing this stuff out may save us lots down the road so I'm willing to hear all options.

Thanks for the help in advance.

 
Well, I dunno what kind of hardware you are using, but you could get a lab setup with 2 cisco routers and a serial link, and put a very restrictive bandwidth on the serial interface, and then let 'er rip.
 
setup a *BSD box with PF and ALTQ....you can simulate lossy links, set speeds on traffic, do QoS for certain types of traffic...etc etc....I have used it for that very same thing before, so I might be able to help you out or point you in the direction of good help if you need it
 
a couple of the user friendly *nix firewall distro's have easy to setup and use packet shappers. m0n0wall does for sure but i believe so does clarkconnect and smoothwall.
 
Well, this atleast gets me started. Going the BSD route will be difficult and I don't have any Cisco gear (yet) but running a Mono/Smothwall box might work and from the way they get recomended around here should be easy enough to learn.

Atleast its a place to start.
 
very very easy to learn and use. Just setup the pipe which sets the bandwidth the rule you create has. Then create the rule to say what data goes to that pipe.
 
Party2go9820 said:
I know this is really backwards from what this forum normally sees, but there is method to my madness.

I'm about to get into a project involving several sites potentially connected with partial T1's and I was wondering if there is a way to simulate these slow links so I can do some testing in a lab environment before going live.

Is there an easy way to throttle the speeds down to simulate a 512k or 768k speed link? Obvously free and cheap would be better than expensive, but testing this stuff out may save us lots down the road so I'm willing to hear all options.

Thanks for the help in advance.
Click to expand...

If your not against setting up virtual environments then Vmware workstation 5 will do what you want. You can simulate whatever speeds you want as well as packet loss across those links.
 
If you are running a Windows environment and are just trying to do it between two test machines you may want to look into Bandwidth Controller (google it). It's commercial last I checked but I used the alpha demo (.1a or .b or something) on my ICS W2k3 server box for about two years to manage the bandwidth. It worked fantastic except that it was a real pain to uninstall (to its credit I did manage to fubar it pretty bad). I think it costs like $30 or something. Just another option if you are running windows and don't want to add in another box to the mix. Bandwidth Controller afaik will only control bandwidth, not latency/packetloss for reference.

-hoka
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top