Need QOS advice

[rlcronin]

My internet connection is 60 megabits down and 8 megabits up.

I've got a Linux box on my network that connects off to a corporate network via a VPN over port 443. One of the things that box does is to ftp a huge file to the corporate network every 6 hours. When that ftp kicks off it negatively impacts all the other machines on my local network. I would somehow like to reduce the impact of that ftp, but since the ftp happens over the vpn, I can't just put a QOS rule in for ftp. It seems to me I'd have to put in a rule to reduce the priority of traffic on port 443 from that box. I can do that if thats the only way, but the downside of that is that its going to impact all traffic out of that box to the vpn, not just the ftp.

I read about a Linux command called "tc" that seems as though I could use on that box to reduce the impact of just the ftp traffic. The trouble is I am no Linux expert and the description of how to use "tc" is opaque enough (to me) that I don't know where to even begin. It is one of those really nice general tools that you can probably use to accomplish just about anything, but SO general that its impossible to figure out how to do the simplest of things (and of course, no real helpful examples of same on the man page).

Anyone out there with "tc" experience that could give me a turnkey way to do what I want? Let's say I wanted to limit ftp to a max throughput of 1 megabit/sec.

Or any other ideas how to go about this?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.
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bc

 

[RMerlin]

Have you checked if your FTP client doesn't have an option that would allow you to limit its throughput? That would be the simplest way to control it.

 

[rlcronin]

Have you checked if your FTP client doesn't have an option that would allow you to limit its throughput? That would be the simplest way to control it.

At the moment I'm just using the inbuilt command line ftp, which has limited functionality and no bandwidth limiting features that I can see. As it is a fairly tightly controlled company machine I have limited choice of software I can install. That said, I haven't yet searched the catalog of available packages to see if there might be a better ftp client. I'll do that. Thanks for the suggestion.
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bc

 

[RMerlin]

At the moment I'm just using the inbuilt command line ftp, which has limited functionality and no bandwidth limiting features that I can see. As it is a fairly tightly controlled company machine I have limited choice of software I can install. That said, I haven't yet searched the catalog of available packages to see if there might be a better ftp client. I'll do that. Thanks for the suggestion.
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bc

See if you can install ncftp. I don't know if it does have a bandwith control option, but it does have quite a few nice features over the basic ftp command.

 

[rlcronin]

Found lftp is installed by default in the distro, so that will suffice. Thanks again for the nudge. I really didn't fancy the idea of wrestling with "tc".
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bc