POSTS
🕹️ gaming via fon, belgacom|skynet (shorewall & gaming)
By Philip
Hello interwebs,
The past 2 days i’ve been playing with shorewall’s traffic shaping and reading the lartc.
Long story short: succes!
- goal: game with a good ping (latency) for everybody on a lan party (~10 people)
- problem: when pepole are surfing, gaming becomes impossible due to hig ping
- bandwith
we use a fon hotspot to use internet, wich has limited bandwith (~2,8Mbit if we’re lucky)
If the people who host the fon spot use internet or tv, the fon users get what is left!
Everybody want’s to be gaming and surfing and stream footbal matches and updating steam games and downloading stuff, there is to much traffic and to few bandwidth
- solution
since we had an excisting firewall with shorewall (laptop + alfanetwork awus036nh wifi adapter, fully auto reconnecting & login) i chose to investigate the traffic shaper include.
first we need to check what the average bandwidth is, as a reference. This is done via a speedtest. This was 2,8Mbit download and 2,8Mbit upload! (note: the traffic shaping was still disabled)
now we can configure shorewall to do some traffic shaping:
create 3 files in /etc/shorewall:- tcdevices, this is where we define what interface we will be using for the shaping. I chose a safe in and out bandwidth (~85% of the bandwidth we got from the speedtest). Note: this has to be lower then the speedtest bandwidth. (read notes below)
#INTERFACE IN-BANDWITH OUT-BANDWIDTH wlan1 2400kbit 240kbit- tcclasses, this defines wich priorities i want and how many bandwidth they get guaranteed (RATE), and the maximum bandwith they will get if there is room (CEIL). note: there has to be one class marked as default, this is where al undefined traffic goes (see next item: tcrules)
#INTERFACE MARK RATE CEIL PRIORITY OPTIONS wlan1 1 full/3 full 1 tos-minimize-delay wlan1 2 full/4 full 2 wlan1 3 full/4 full 3 default- tcrules, here you define what port, ip or protocol the packet will use what class. you mark the packet with a number (ACTION), that corresponds with a class mark (defined in tcclasses) This is a very crude example, all echo-request&echo-reply + udp packets will get top priority. Oh and the tcp/1119 port. All other traffic wil go to class 3, wich has the lowes priority; as you read the previous part you will note that this isn’t nessesary because all traffic defaults to class 3 (lowest priority)
#ACTION SOURCE DEST PROTO PORT(S) CLIENT USER # PORT(S) 1 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp echo-request 1 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp echo-reply 1 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp 1 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp 1119 # blizzard games 3 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp
testing
For testing assured the link was not used. I started quake3 an connected to an internet server. The average latency was 60ms. I then started downloading iso files, sending large mail’s, watching youtube, the latency in quake3 stayed below 80ms.
This is good, without the traffic shaping it jumped to 600-1000ms and higher when people started surfing and uploading.
conclusion
succes! We now can game and use the internet without the gaming being disturbed!!
For more info/explenations you always can contact me: philip <-at-> vanmontfort </dot/> be
note:
- fon_belgacom hotspots have priorities: the paying customer always gets what he pays for (internet and/or tv), then the fon users get what’s left. If the user is heavily using torrents and watching HD-tv, fon hotspot might get much less then 2800Mbit. If this happens you can lower the IN-BANDWITH in tcdevices.
- all udp traffic is getting high priority, this means dns, torrent, … . the tcrules could be refined with the correct game ports and removing the all udp rule.