2.3. What Linux can do for you

A small list of things that are possible:

• Throttle bandwidth for certain computers

• Throttle bandwidth TO certain computers

• Help you to fairly share your bandwidth

• Protect your network from DoS attacks

• Protect the Internet from your customers

• Multiplex several servers as one, for load balancing or enhanced availability

• Restrict access to your computers

• Limit access of your users to other hosts

• Do routing based on user id (yes!), MAC address, source IP address, port, type of service, time of day or content

Currently, not many people are using these advanced features. This is for several reasons. While the provided documentation is verbose, it is not very hands-on. Traffic control is almost undocumented.