pfSense for QoS at a LAN Party

elgwhoppo.com/2012/11/17/using-pfsense-f...ds-and-http-traffic/


One of our friends at ForgeLAN wrote this up. What he did was amazing.

Awesome job JOOOOOOOOOO!

Thx Arxon! I should be posting updated firewall rules today, some of the old ones didn't have UDP traffic in them, which meant laggy LoL and SC2.

Just updated the rules to v1.1 and added more to the post.

Plague wrote: Hey JOOOOOOOOOO. Thanks for the comment reply on your blog. I was able to get it to install but I am running into the same problem I had the first time. I got a screen with the following and it is stuck on it.

F1 pfSense

F6 PXE
Boot: F1
\


And it just is stuck on that, no ethernet plugged in. It is a P4 with 2Gb RAM and some sata hard drive in it. I am using the onboard NIC and 1 tp-link 1Gb PCI card.

I am not sure why it will not boot.

Definitely sounds to me like the hardware and pfSense aren't getting along somehow. Maybe try Googling some of the components to see if they're known to be problematic with pfSense?

Like Dreyvas said, perhaps the hardware isn't configured right or compatible. Sounds to me like a disk controller.

forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=39180.0

The above topic had a guy with a similar issue, can you try setting the SATA operation to IDE instead of AHCI?

After that, the next best bet would be checking the FreeBSD supported hardware list to see if your controller/mobo is on there. HTH!

www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html

If your interested in how to get the traffic shaping working with multi-wan interfaces for load balancing you can see some screenies here - (forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,60613.0.html).

Basically for shaping to work correctly you have to use floating rules and select all the interfaces under those rules with leaving the direction at any.

Additionally , I chose to use Alias's for the gaming protocls and ports and grouped them per game type to help with troubleshooting.

This has been tested live at the NeXus-miniLAN on April 6th and will be run again at the next one. We had 18 people at the miniLAN banging away at this with two TWC 30/5 modems load balancing and there were a couple of people downloading games from Steam and others gaming on the internet with no one having any lag or issues.

The key to the load balancing is to add to the default any any rule for the LAN a gateway group so that traffic will go out either WAN connection. Sitcky connections are needed so you don't gateway bounce and cause freeze issues in certain games.

This will basically be the same config applied to the LANOC router and run at the next event.

This type of config can be expanded for however many interfaces and then you can get fancy with the gateway groups as well for failover.

I plan on testing a live failover at the mini-LAN to see what happens when we lose a WAN connection.

Excellent post Sideout, thanks much. I've posted another revision of the config that has individualized TCP limiters, in case that's of interest. We'll see how it fares at Forge LAN on the 20th.

elgwhoppo.com/2013/09/04/pfsense-lan-par...limited-tcp-streams/

JOOOOOOOOOO wrote: Excellent post Sideout, thanks much. I've posted another revision of the config that has individualized TCP limiters, in case that's of interest. We'll see how it fares at Forge LAN on the 20th.

elgwhoppo.com/2013/09/04/pfsense-lan-par...limited-tcp-streams/

Might also want to check this out: www.lanoc.org/forum/18-tech-talk/27176-s...e-bandwidth-solution

Nice. I have wanted to play with limiters but felt that it was a bulky configuration.

I have been using Layer7 blocks as well for BitTorrent and other protocols that are port agile and it seems to work pretty well for catching the majority of them.

When I turn it on , my curse client fails to download but when I turn it off , it works fine.

It will be interesting to see how the current config holds up under load. Based off of NexusLAN the last time , it did well and I have had some time to refine it and tune it a bit more along with adding the Nginx server for caching.