Hello all,

I'm wondering if there is a way to throttle incoming scp transfers. I'm having bandwidth contention problems and would like to limit the total bandwidth per transfer, or connection.

I'm kinda doubting this can be done via opensshd (I can't find docs about this, anyway). I thought that perhaps iptables could do this, but am unsure how I would go about it.

I also thought about 'tc' command, but I really don't know how to use it, and as I understand it, it would affect the entire net interface, which isn't what I want.

Thoughts?

Bandwidth shaping *does* affect the whole interface but you can filter traffic so shaping only penalises whatever matches the filter. There's two "problems" though: 0) you can't affect inbound traffic directly only through shaping outbound traffic (AFAIK) and 1) SCP basically is the SSH protocol so that will affect everything on port TCP/22. (I vaguely remember there's a library you can LD_PRELOAD which should make apps behave somewhat like a modern version of "wget" does but I can't remember the name or location.) Searching LQ should show a lot of threads on bandwidth shaping. Else check out the Linux advanced Routing & Traffic Control (LARTC) HOWTO which has examples as well.