by
bmah » Thu Oct 05, 2017 9:27 am
dhwalker wrote:Thanks, Bruce. How is pfSense working for you? I decided to get a Linksys WRT3200ACM wireless router that I plan to put DD-WRT router software on. pfSense looked pretty good, but I use WiFi pretty extensively, so I wanted the strong WiFi hardware that tends to be available only for specifically-marketed WiFi devices.
I'm thinking of starting off simple, turning on PIE or some other queue management algorithm that addresses buffer bloat, but not setting any specific priorities. As I said earlier, I don't mind things slowing down; I just don't want them to stop for a few minutes. I think better queue management should do that without me worrying about which protocols are consuming a lot of bandwidth and lowering their priorities. I'll post my experiences after I've gotten some experience.
pfSense is working great for me, although admittedly I've used it for many years so I've grown accustomed to any quirks it may have.
Couple points (maybe you're aware of these already): 1) pfSense is software, not hardware...you can run it on many types of x86_64 hardware. At my house, I'm using the Netgate SG-2440 (
https://www.netgate.com/products/sg-2440.html), after using a Soekris net5501 for years. There might be less expensive ways to do this, but this fits my needs well and I didn't have to spend a bunch of time doing integration. Also it's a way of financially supporting pfSense.
2) You don't have to have the same piece of hardware doing your routing function and wireless. The above SG-2440 has no wireless interfaces on it...I'm using a couple of Ubiquiti AP-AC-LITE (
https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lite/) access points, which have excellent radios.
The traffic prioritization worked pretty well for getting CrashPlan to back up over my 1Mbps sonic.net/AT&T FTTN upload, without interfering with other traffic. But right now, my current project is to back up a bunch of stuff to Backblaze B2 (getting ready to migrate away from CrashPlan). Those uploads go out a Comcast connection at 6Mbps (because the 1Mbps upload over sonic.net/AT&T FTTN would take way too long). I didn't set up anything in particular to handle the Backblaze B2 uploads, so I think all I'm using is the default pfSense traffic shaper setup, which allocates some upstream bandwidth for TCP ACKs. In fact I was trying to figure out what ruleset I could use to de-prioritize the Backblaze uploads, and haven't been able to think of a good one yet.
Bruce.
PS. I was hoping to be able to get rid of my Comcast connection, but the FTTN upload speed is too low for me to rely solely on that for network backups, even after I'm done with this CrashPlan -> Backblaze B2 project. To put it mildly, this sucks.
I'm probably going to keep the FTTN anyway, since we were paying about the same for sonic.net Fusion (and AT&T POTS before that). Hope these ramblings are useful.