It really has been about 1.5 years since my last post. I have been busy and now have plenty to write about.A few months ago I deployed a dedicated system running m0n0wall at the edge of my network. I needed to find a firewall and router that could do the usual firewally things. I needed support for inbound and outbound NAT, DHCP and DNS for LAN clients, and inbound VPN when I am away. I did not want the firewall to rely on any other system in the network aside from the ISP’s router. Last year a new requirement surfaced in that the office needed shaping and prioritizing of traffic to and from the Internet. There is a VOIP adapter here for AT&T CallVantage. Skype is also used periodically. Real time traffic needs priority over everything else. Traffic related to the web and email servers need to run at the lowest priority. Services like SMTP don’t need the full bandwidth of my connection here in either direction. I often find bursts of incoming SMTP can cause drop-outs on the VOIP calls. The several workstations on the network here need reasonable connectivity - high priority than the servers but less than the VOIP traffic. Finally, if a class of service is not competing with any other, that service should get the bulk of available bandwidth regardless of priority.Here is a high-level diagram of my network.From m0n0wallWith the next few postings, I will go into detail of how I successfully deployed m0n0wall on this network to satisfy these requirements.