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?

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