General Questions

Can anybody advise if m0n0Wall can be used for TCP Acceleration purposes?

E.g. spoofing a TCP ACK to a network node, etc.

If so can someone give me a nudge in the right direction, I'm stumped if I can figure it out and believe I may have found something not already in the archives!

To clarify, this would be for use on a large latency (450ms+) WAN e.g. Satellite.

Thanks in advance,

James

If you spoof the packet on a high latency system (satellite is more like 1000ms due to the speed of light?) then I don't think you'll be able to break the laws of physics and get a faster data transfer rate if that's your goal.

A round trip to and from a satellite is about 450ms: 225ms from site A to the satellite and 225ms from the satellite to site B, give or take.

You would have to wait until the ACK packet was received before sending the next datagram, so you can reduce the delay between packet sending if you spoof the ACK on site A.

See here for overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_acceleration and here for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_spoofing


So can m0n0wall spoof a TCP ACK packet then?  This is a technical forum isn't it?

If you are getting pings that low, are you using a one-way system?
Two way systems won't have pings that low due to the speed of light.

TCP acceleration isn't going to make any gains on a satellite system. The ping times work against you at increasing the throughput of the data due the the vary natural of TCP wanting to ensure that no data is lost at the other end.

You would be better off tweaking the TCP settings of your computer than trying to have the firewall fake ACK packets.

To answer your question though. A stock m0n0wall won't do what you are asking, that would be more of a IPTables setup when you want to hack up the packets going through your firewall.