Traffic Shaping

I am using m0n0wall to model the network conditions that my organisation's overseas offices experience.  This allows us to test how well different applications perform under those conditions and make adjustments accordingly.  I thought I'd share how I am doing this in case it is useful to others, and also to see if anyone sees any problems with my method.

For each office I am using www.speedtest.net to get an approximate measurement of bandwidth both up and down, and the delay.  I then take the figures I have and create two pipes in m0n0 for each office - one with the download bandwidth and one with the upload bandwidth. 

I then create a rule for each of these pipes - the download rule is for incoming traffic on the WAN for any protocol, any port and to and from any host.  This has the download pipe applied to it.
I create a similar rule for uploading except here the rule is for outgoing traffic on the WAN.

I then activate only the two rules for the particular office I want to model.

So far this seems to be effective.  Has anyone got any suggestions for how I might improve this?  I'm particularly interested in any ideas on how to better gather the information on network conditions in our offices.  Does anyone see any flaws in my use of pipes and rules?

Thanks to the hardwork of all those on the m0n0wall team!

Duncan Drury
International IT Officer
Christian Aid