Packet rate limiter

[chrishome at austin.rr.com]

> Hi
> 
> is there any way how to limit packet per second [PPS] rate to 
> specified 
> IP (group of IP) ? Linux can achieve this via IPtables.
> I`ve searched a lot of web, but nothing interesting found (for PF, 
> IPFilter, and IPFW).
> 

I agree this would be a very nice addition to IPFW as a basic feature,
or maybe a more advanced version via Dummynet.  It's much to easy for a
trojan / virus or intentionally malicious user to flood a FreeBSD box
setup as a router with loads of tiny UDP packets on port 80.  In fact,
just a few days ago we had 2 users behind one of our FreeBSD gateways
sending huge loads of traffic to a webhosting site..  This packet count
shown below was all within a 12 hour period ;) 

00010   990465375    39618916491 deny ip from 172.17.106.114 to any
00010    20010976      800449444 deny ip from 172.17.105.114 to any


Being able to put limits per protocol would be a wonderful addition. 
For now what we do is setup a count rule by MAC address for every user,
we check the count rules every 60 seconds, if we begin to see packets
per second for a certain host climb above for example 4000PPS, we simply
automatically add a deny rule.  These are generally users set for 1 or 2
Mbps each, so 4000PPS is pretty extreme for that kind of bandwidth
unless your doing something you shouldn't.

I've been talking to a few friends about possibly adding this to ipfw or
dummynet, and if I ever get around to a completed working version, I
would be more than happy to share, but for now, there are ways to still
fix the problem, just not as elegant as if it where actually a firewall
rule ;)

Chris Bowman