Packet Prioritizing..
 

Hi all. I 'm the "supervisor" of an an Access Point in our wireless community network. I have a linux box that successfully routes packets across different subnetworks, using different paths for each one..

I wonder if there is something like what I'm going to describe around on the net...

Can a program(network driver) analyse packets that pass through a gateway, and send them off to their destinations with spesific priorities? An ex:

We play games and download a lot. Can a program give 100% priority to UDP packets, echo requests and the same, and give 0% percent to TCP, or even better, favor HTTP against FTP,DC and other means od DLing?

All this of course must happen in the gateway, not @ the client's side, and should be transparent.

Asking 4 2 much?:cry:

I have never tried, but the linux kernel does have some Quality of Service and Policy-based routing features.

http://snafu.freedom.org/linux2.2/iproute-notes.html

udp has no flow control mechanism and TCP does. if you give 100% priority to UDP over TCP, and someone decides to bombard you network with UDP traffic...everything that uses TCP will appear not to work.

we did an experiment with this in a networking class i took:

1. send UDP and TCP traffice through the router as fast as possible with the default kernel

results: UDP starved out TCP

2. modify the kernel to give priority to TCP and re-run
result UDP still got through but TCP did much better

but i must say we ran ours with a 10Mbs network and not at 100.

we also did a QoS lab...but my lab partner ran that one :) (i got lazy)
you might have to enable QoS and Fair Queing stuff in the kernel and then recompile it.

Wow, sounds very interesting.... Is there any standard packet that I can install so that I get this kind of funtionality?

Which ones do you recommend?

We play lots of games.. So I figure we can run this thing say, but enable only, e.g., at nigth when we play mohaa :)