This post describe how to implement network QoS (Quality of Service) on Linux. It first describes concept and then provides a QuickStart with small automation script to generate adequate "tc" and "iptables" commands. QoS is important for who ever want to avoid conflict in between log and high priority stream, typical examples are:

• avoid to break your VO/IP quality while downloading big files.
• make sure your interactive SSH activity got priority ever WEB browsing
• etc ...
  

While major ISP like Orange, Vodafone, Telfonica, ... have a numbers of independent cabinet to compartmentalize their architecture, this is not an option for small non profit or SOHO organizations that in no way justify such complex architectures and/or neither can afford it.

This note describes "Fridu-in-Xen" virtual ISP architecture, it explains how to simulate a fully compartmentalize mini ISP (Internet Service Provider) running on a unique Linux box and hosted on a cheap remote site (OVH ) leveraging XEN, VPN and QoS. It is build in such a way that anyone with an acceptable level of network and Linux knowledge should be able to replicate the architecture on its own hardware in few hours, then if you like it you may start contributing to the improvement process.

I use this architecture in real for fridu.org to support a number of non profit organizations, obviously it still lack some nice feature like redundancy, load balancing, supervision, ..., it's not that we could not extend "Fridu-in-Xen" to support it, but I have neither the time neither requirements for it. Nevertheless, in its current version it already allows you to provide for a very reduce cost of administration every typical services we expect from a good service provider Portal, Messaging, Voice/IP, ...this with an acceptable level of quality of service including security, backup, QoS, ...