Cybersite Consulting has been involved with networking Linux for around 10 years. This means plenty of practice in real-life situations in deploying Linux on networks and having Linux run the networks. Cybersite Consulting has developed its networking skills even further to specialise into this area covered by traffic shaping, policing and queuing mechanisms for Linux networks.

When traffic shaping a network interface, all the traffic is counted. This happens whether or not the interface is idle or packets are queued ready for transmission. When the traffic reaches a certain bandwidth threshold, additional packets are then put into a queue and delayed, so bandwidth use is limited to the required configuration amount.

Rate limiting, often referred to as traffic policing, is similar to traffic shaping, but instead of delayed traffic the excess may simply be dropped or handled in some other way. Other methods than dropping the packets include lowering the priority field in the IP header.

This allows the business to manage their traffic throughput so as to not exceed their required quotas and be overcharged in some manner.

Queuing allows traffic to be classified as high, normal, medium, or low priority. High-priority traffic is transmitted first, then medium-priority traffic, and so on. This can slow down lower-priority traffic a lot or even completely block it if there is enough higher-priority traffic to fill the entire bandwidth capacity. Priority queuing can be used to assign a medium (or higher) priority to more important traffic such as DNS, while using a lower priority for FTP.

With custom queuing there are a large number of queues and each transmits a configurable amount of data from a queue before proceeding to the next. This queuing method makes it possible to guarantee a minimum amount of bandwidth for certain traffic types. This works similar to the prioritisation queuing model, but allows for any excess bandwidth to be used for all other traffic types. This means we can alter your bandwidth to "slices" for certain protocols or services such as 70% to WWW traffic, 10% to the DNS, and 20% to all other traffic.

All these QoS methods can be used either with traditional protocols, or by assigning special rules to your traffic. Using these rules and routing methods, we can help optimise your traffic flow and help eliminate the excess, unwanted traffic that may be blocking up your networks.

All this can be done either on standard Cisco hardware routers, or on Linux-enabled routers as required. If you need one setup, we would be happy to oblige in providing the hardware already preconfigured for your needs.