Traffic Shaping with PFSense - HFSC and Guaranteed Minimum Bandwidth

Hardware Hub Networking
1

I’m trying to figure out if I could deploy a pfsense box to split bandwidth more efficiently amongst multiple users. At the moment, some users have a flat limit of x megabits on a dedicated line whilst others are just dumped onto a shared pool of bandwidth. The result being that if one of the users in the shared pool needs to have a skype meeting, they have to hope that the other users are not streaming youtube videos etc. Meanwhile, the users on dedicated lines are paying a lot more money for a line they are not utilizing 100% of the time, but when they are, it has far less max bandwidth than what is potentially available on the shared connection.

I was reading into HFSC (and watching this youtube video) and was wondering if it would allow me to put all the users into one shared pool, but be able to guarantee them individually (either by IP or by a LAN interface) a minimum amount of bandwidth. I thought a diagram below might help explain the point.

Has anyone had experience with HFSC? Is it the tool I need? If so, are there any other links that might help explain it to me?

2

Yes you can do that, but I can't remember off the top of my head how. When you configure it there are three settings for bandwidth and one of them is the minimum.

Once you have the traffic shaper configure the way you want you just need to put the traffic in queues which you do using firewall rules. So you can simply create an alias with the devices you wish to shape and create a firewall rule (either the default allow any rule or a floating match only rule) and set the queues in there.

3

Thanks for getting back to me. I'll just have to experiment with a VB instance until I figure it out and I'll report back here if I get a tutorial up. I'm sure a lot of small businesses or budget shared office spaces could do with knowing how to deploy one of these.

4

Did you manage to get this up and running? What did your configuration end up looking like?