[Asterisk-Users] (Semi-OT) QoS Question FTP Living with Asterisk

[Steve Totaro]

I have searched google and came up with too many options and packages 
that may or may not work for my needs, most articles seem to be for 
setting up routers.  Maybe someone on the list can give me some better 
insight.

I have monitoring turned on my "shift eight (tm)" (Asterisk ;-)) box for 
all calls.  We have over one hundred agents and tons of recordings in 
wav format.  I also have a cron job that runs a script to mux the in and 
out files and ftp them to a NAS device and it runs every five minutes. 

The NAS device and the * box are both directly connected to a Cisco 
Gigabit switch.  I have had complaints of calls fading in and out and 
also cutting off.  After reviewing the recordings, some of these 
complaints seem valid and I suspect the sheer bandwidth of the FTP 
traffic is causing the issues.  I also run nagios checks on the box and 
get ping warnings on a regular basis. 

My question is, how can I throttle the FTP (Standard with dist) 
transfers using out of the box CentOS4.3 (or any easy to use, low 
learning curve package)?  I thought about FTPing the files at less 
frequent intervals but that just makes the issue less frequent but last 
longer. 

I would like to accomplish throttling FTP on the Linux box with a 
solution that is not too elegant since this is a production machine in a 
busy call center.  If I cannot do it on the * box I guess my next step 
is to see if the Cisco Gigabit switch has any QoS functionality. 

Thanks,
Steve