[H-GEN] Link overload

Michael Anthon anthonm at tams.com.au
Mon Aug 31 21:52:17 EDT 1998


I'm having a little bit of a problem with my link (33k6 to Telstra Big
Pond Direct).  

The setup I have is a P133 running Linux as a gateway/firewall machine
and I have a mail server sitting behind this on a private subnet.
Incoming mail is accepted by the gateway machine using sendmail, which
the relays it to the other machine.  Outgoing mail is sent directly from
the internal machine using ip masquerading.

The problem is that when a large mail item is being sent (fairly common
occurrence), pretty much ALL other traffic gets stopped.  It seems to me
that the ip masquerading has a higher priority or something, but I don't
really know much about this stuff.

One solution that has been suggested to me is to upgrade the kernel to
2.1.xxx and use the profiling (?) abilities of the new masquerading code
to limit the bandwidth available to the other machine.  Another
possibility that pops into my head is to relay outgoing mail via
sendmail on the gateway in the hope that this might improve the sharing
of the link.

Anyone else got any suggestions ?

Regards
Michael Anthon

TAMS Systems





More information about the General mailing list