iPhone / netnice

Similar to what they did with Aperture rebates a while back, they’ll be doing the same thing with the iPhone. $100 ain’t too shabby.

Do any of you Unix-heads know if there is some network-equivalent of the “nice” command for limiting bandwidth under Linux and/or OS X? For instance, it might let me issue a command such as the following:

netnice wget http://someurl

Yes, I am aware that wget itself has some bandwidth-limiting options, but that’s beside the point. There are other commands that do not, plus it’s easier to remember one command than it is to look up all the right flags for every command and it would be nice to alter a speed after a program has been launched. Architecturally, I don’t really see how this could work without a proxy or nasty Linux-specific drivers and iptables hacks because there’s not much in the network stack that can be hooked for such a purpose. I can do some basic Quality-of-Service hacks in my fancy Layer-2 router, but they’re based on what jack you’re plugged into (i.e. granularity down to a specific machine, but not program-by-program-within-the-same-machine.) I have a feeling this is an impossible search. Searching for various combinations of the terms “Unix network nice command bandwidth QoS, etc.” does not yield anything useful.

Posted in: iPhone Software

2 thoughts on “iPhone / netnice”

  1. Trickle. The winning search was “linux userspace bandwidth shaper” although I didn’t have much luck with my first try, “linux ld_preload bandwidth” — although now I realize I was thinking of tsocks, the Linux ld_preload-based thing that turns everything that uses sockets into something that supports SOCKS proxies.

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