As part of the networking class that I am studying, we did a deep dive into routing. The class allows for hands-on practice using a virtual machine sandbox (which I’ll be sharing screenshots here), but I have also been supporting that with studying pages 395-420, and 231-277 in the All-In-One Network+ study book by Mike Meyers. There’s a lot of details so mixing it up like that is helpful for me.

Quality of Service (QoS), also known as traffic shaping, is the prioritization of data, such as VOIP or streaming data, within a network.

For hands-on, I’ll be using PfSense, a firewall appliance. First, to create a high usage user alias, two users in this case:

Next, I want to build out some rules for the guest wi-fi network, so I use the QoS wizard to do so. Here I’m creating some of those rules, including bandwidth of uploading and downloading:

Then, I want to set some parameters around the usage of VoiP:

Next, there are a variety of options to configure, such as what applications one wishes to limit or to prioritize, including VPN. Here I have prioritized those services:

These are all part of the robust configuration options.