> 1) Why is RH a bad choice? It's not necessarily bad, for example they can sell you good commercial support, and most commercial binary-only applications will only support RH kernels (e.g. Clearcase). However, RH tends to have their own ideas about a bunch of stuff which doesn't always match the 'mainstream'. This is why I quit using RH for my own projects and instead use Mandrake. It's RH-like, but rather more in sync with the 'normal' Linux environment. There are other distributions which have their own 'better' attributes for any given task too. > 2) Why the sarcasm about not wanting to recompile the kernel? I love using > Linux, and I have recompiled kernels before. However, in this application it > may not be my best choice. You do not know my situation. I tried recompiling > the kernel on this machine and had much trouble with the particular SCSI > card in that machine. However, I felt this list was limited to routing > issues and NOT kernel recompilation issues with a SCSI card. Yeah, try the RPM rebuilding route that I suggested. I too became frustrated with the typical Linux community suggestion that you should rebuild from source in the classic manner---I found that the result almost always breaks something which previously worked in the distro kernel. If you build from the source RPM, modulo some corner cases such as using a different compiler build, you'll be making exactly the same binary that RH made. > 4) I'm not the qdisc or routing master, but from my reading I understand the > following: > -An egress qdisc applied to eth0 ONLY shapes traffic leaving eth0, > NOT eth1, eth2, etc. Right, it's per-interface shaping. > -I don't want to write an egress qdisc for each of my 9 interfaces, > plus I also want ingress control. Correct. Plus, if you want to correctly share incoming bandwidth between nodes which are on the other side of more than one of those interfaces, then separate shaping won't do what you want (the queue at each interface has no knowledge of the situation at any of the other interfaces). Therefore you need IMQ. > 5) I have different types of customers on each interface, hence different > traffic flows and speeds. Without IMQ you'll be able to shape on each interface, but you won't be able to fairly distribute the same bandwidth between customers on different interfaces.