traffic shaping = QOS?

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Rix2357

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 15, 2001
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Is traffic shaping another term for QOS or do they have certain nuances?

I was looking for a router or *nix router solution for a long time because I was interested in having some sort of priority system in place since I run a server 24/7 and wish to browse the net at the same time.

Anyways, I decided to give pfsense a try when I saw that there was an option for "traffic shaping". This actually works as opposed to the QOS thing in a hacked firmware + WRT54G/GS. I could set all the stuff up in the configuration page on the WRT54GS, but it did absolutely nothing. Web browsing while uploading was still a horrible experience, but it's all fixed using a p3 celeron at 1.2Ghz (overkill I know) with pfsense on it.

Now I need to get some quieter hardware to run this on and reconfigure my WRT54GS as an access point.
 
yes kinda, but i think traffic shaping can also define how much max bandwidth one resource can use, while qos gives unlimited bandwidth to each resource but allows the ports which have a higher priority to send data first.
 
They are similar, but different in both purpose and implementation. Traffic shaping is mainly concerned with giving more or less bandwidth to certain ports/protocols/addresses/etc. QoS is concerned with passing higher priority packets through before lower priority packets.
 
IPCop supports traffic shaping and it works decently. Future release will support QoS. (It on their to do list) Plus, it supports use of compact flash drives. I use it on a 512mb compact flash drive in a Neoware thin client. The thin client is an 800mhz w/ 512mb ram. I also run a dedicated streaming media server. The firewall never breaks 10% utilization even when I have saturated my pipe.
 
After running pfsense I noticed that the low priority traffic seems to have a lot of dropped packets. As far as bandwidth utilization, everything seems to run at nearly full speed. One funny thing that I ran into while setting pfsense up was that one of the changes I made resulted in all traffic going from the LAN side to the WAN side got blocked. The only changes I made were: LAN address to 192.168.2.1, DHCP range set to 100 to 150, set some static assignments (weird how I can't set static assignments in the DHCP range), port forwarding, and traffic shaping through the wizard, and Dynamic DNS. But evidently, making all of them or nearly all of them at once did something to stop traffic that needs to go through the WAN. Is that a bug or did I really mess with some sort of rule that I wasn't supposed to?

I think I'm going to have to check out some of the others such as IPCop and m0n0wall as mentioned. Anyone know any other *nix based router/firewalls with traffic shaping?
 
This is how I've been taught and understand the difference between Quality of Service and Traffic Shaping:

QoS is just the whole entire concept of making sure the correct users get the correct priorities in network usage. That could include blocking Port 25 SMTP traffic from all the WAP's so no one could spam, but allowing people inside the offices to use it freely. At the same time. This means higher quality service because the untrackable users (Assuming its a public WAP) wouldn't be able to degrade the network for anyone else.

Traffic Shaping on the other hand is where it watches all the traffic (Not Port Based) and analyzes each packet. It then will see something like, Oh, KaZaa traffic or ooh AIM traffic and then limit it to only having a 1kbps path to take, while it will notice that all the traffic going over windows file sharing to the big file server in the back room will get full access, using whatever bandwidth is available. Perhaps the admin wants to give the exec's full use of the company network, but still want the servers to have as much b/w as they need, it will then limit them to whatever is not being used by the servers.
Traffic Shaping is just a form of QoS.

inform me if I'm wrong.

-randyc
 
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