11 Oct 08 Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 4 – Customization, Debian Scripts, Shaping, Firewall, NAT, picoLCD

Follow On From: 05 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 3 – Installing Debian, Prebuilt Disk Image

Following on from the previous article, I’ve written some scripts which you’ll find in the /root/scripts/ directory of the prebuilt image. I’ve attached and commented them here, as they could also be useful elsewhere.

bridge.sh #For setting up a simple bridge
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Tags: 532a, APNIC Box, bandwidth management, bandwidth rate, bridge, cbq, ifconfig, iproute2, iptables, lcd, Linux, picolcd, qdisc, routerboard, routerboard 532a, shaping, tc, time, usblcd, usleep

17 Sep 08 95th percentile billing explaination

95th percentile billing commonly misspelled as “percential” is a method used by some NOCs to change for bandwidth.

The system is simple and essentially discards the top 5% of your traffic peaks, and then uses the next value down as your bandwidth rate. 5% of a month is 36 hours. This might sound like a bit of a scam, because you’re being billed for bandwidth consumption that you may not have used, but it’s not difficult to get it to work for you.

If you’re hosting a site where a lot of content is downloaded, it may be better to go for bandwidth billing. A client’s content server uses about 8,000GB transfer per month and shows a 95th percentile of 34mbit/sec. It’s certainly cheaper to pay for 8,000GB transfer over 30+mbit/sec dedicated.
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Tags: 95th, 95th percential, 95th percentile, bandwidth consumption, bandwidth management, bandwidth rate, burst, content, datacenter, download, Hosting, limiting, noc, peak, peaks, servers, shaping, traffic, traffic peaks