At home some eager p2p people had made life not so nice for me. The comcast cable -- and for that fact any broadband offer -- has asymmetric bandwidth. So even though we have 3Mb download bandwidth, the 256 Kb bandwidth kills the download applications whenever anyone starts uploading data. The reason being that the TCP acks get delayed and the sender thinks that there isn't enough downstream bandwidth. So after a few days of running around annoyed, I finally yanked out the DSL router and put my linux box in. I thought I would rate limit the p2p people. I spent a few nights fighting and attempting to configure rate limiting on my linux box. All to no avail. Also, I have been a bit paranoid that the linux box might get cracked. So, finally I put OpenBSD on my erstwhile Linux box. OpenBSD has a superior filtering/queueing/QoS mechanism built into the system and they claim that it is secure by default. A lot of people swear by OpenBSD security. So anyway, three nights and I am finally done with the whole configuration and feeling quite good about it. What I ended up doing is really simple and extremely effective. All I did was to create a separate priority queue for the acknowledgements in the upstream direction. So whenever the upstream is backlogged, the ACK packets get priority over other traffic. Muahahaha, finally my ssh connections suck no more. Very, very responsive interactive sessions. To top everything, even the VNC works like I am sitting in front of my SunRay in the college.
Once I read somewhere that a famous person stopped using Usenet. His reason was that people are intentionally malicious and rude when they are online. Hmm, seems quite true. On the college "slush" mailing list -- meant to discuss worthless topics ad nauseum -- a student responded to a professor rather rudely. That too when the professor was attempting to be helpful. Go figure.
Zzzzzzz....