QOS Settings for Router to limit FAH network impact?

[nuggie]

Hi all,

I run FAH on several PCs on my home network, and I also have a VOIP line connected to the same router.

My network connection is only 512kbps upload, and when uploading a completed WU, FAH consumes all the bandwidth. Unfortunately if I'm on a VOIP phone call at the time, my call is pretty much over as the call quality completely degrades.

My router does have QOS setting to prioritize network traffic. I'd like to set it up so that connections to the FAH server(s) have lower priority than my connection to my VOIP provider so I can continue to use my phone when a WU result is being uploaded.

I can specify a range of local/remote IP addresses, local/remote ports, and packet types (TCP or UDP) in the QOS setup. My question is, what are appropriate entries to use for FAH to accomplish this, given that there are probably several different servers that I might connect to?

Or if there's some other way to configure upload bandwidth usage in FAH, that might work too.

Thanks!

[bruce]

Welcome to foldingforum.org, nuggie.

This has been discussed periodically and I've added your question to an open ticket #91 for the development of the new V7 client. (I'd like to see the client take an active role in dealing with this issue.)

Nevertheless, you can probably manage your router settings manually. If your VOIP is physically a different network device than the computer(s) that are folding, I'd plan on identifying them by local IP addresses. This may require setting fixed IP addresses rather than using DHCP.

FAH uses only ports 80 and 8080, so that may also be helpful.

There are quite a number of servers and more are added from time to time so that's probably not a good discriminator.
See http://fah-web.stanford.edu/pybeta/serverstat.html

[AtwaterFS]

Your VOIP traffic should be set to DSCP 46 (EF) which is highest, this is a default setting for VOIP traffic. It's probably not being classified properly and thus being lumped in with the rest of the trash.

Your router's manual would be a good place to start, then maybe your ISP can help. VOIP should be tagged as highest priority, that should be all you care about, unless u want FAH traffic below web-browsing for some reason.

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/13324

[AtwaterFS]

FAH couldn't really do anything with QOS since most data is DSCP 0 which is default and there is no lower setting, but u could implement a slider for bandwidth usage I guess, similar to GPU usage slider in older 6.23 GPU client (I haven't messed with any of the new clients). That would be pretty easily do-able since ur not recreating the wheel there.

[nuggie]

VOIP should be tagged as highest priority, that should be all you care about, unless u want FAH traffic below web-browsing for some reason.

Thanks Bruce and AtwaterFS.

Ideally I would like FAH traffic prioritized below web-browsing so that it truly does work in the background and doesn't affect my day to day activities that require network traffic. e.g. to maintain a streamed video broadcast if a WU completes and decides to upload in the middle of the broadcast.

Any suggestions on how to specifically distinguish FAH traffic from other web traffic? The FAH servers' IP addresses seem to be pretty varied... is there an IP address mask that might apply?

[AtwaterFS]

Then sounds like IP's would likely be ur best bet (altho imperfect as Bruce pointed out). Check http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/STANFO/nets and http://fah-web.stanford.edu/pybeta/serverstat.html and try to organize into blocks with subnetting (if ur router allows this)

Check ur router manual to see what it can actually do (maybe FW upgrade can enhance/improve features?), and then call the ISP since they should probably be able to help you with your VOIP traffic not being classified/treated properly

That said if u wanna try on ur own (I know I would) per Cisco at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/t ... 4660.shtml

u can set up ACL's:

VOIP VOICE (per Cisco, urs maybe diff) udp any any range 16384 32767

So set this udp range to highest priority since ur VOIP traffic will LIKELY be in this range.

Then as above, set FAH IP's listed on http://fah-web.stanford.edu/pybeta/serverstat.html into ur router in subnet format (for brevity / ur sanity) as long as that's supported by ur router, and assign this traffic to lowest priority. Note that some of those IP's belong to other universities such as RPI, I remember there was a Swedish one too back in the days... Just use their blocks by looking them up in ARIN.net or RIPE.net for European IP's (ARIN should redirect u)

See how that goes and let us know

[the animal]

Langouste allows upload capping.

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