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Last Update: Jan 24th, 2019
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Using Time of Day Profiles in ET/BWMGR v5

ET/BWMGR v5 has a new, more flexible way of allowing you to control what bandwidth settings are applied at different times of day. In previous versions, "Profile Transitions" required you to create a series of profiles where one profile would be "active" at different times of day. The new mechanism is easier and also more flexible.

Time Profiles

Time profiles have been introduced; they describe a sequence of bandwidth profiles that are applied at different times of the day, and on specific days of the week. You can create a single time profile to many rules, and you can apply apply multiple profiles to a single rule. In order to add time profiles, you have to have bandwidth profiles defined.
For our example, I've defined some simple bandwidth profiles.

Bandwidth profiles

The 3 profiles can assign 3 levels of bandwidth usage. Using Time Profiles, we can apply those profiles at different times per day.

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To create a time profile, give it a name, select the days of the week that you want it to apply, and then select a profile and the time of day that you want it to be applied.

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When you press the Save Profile button, you'll see the profile show up under the buttons and another time selection set will appear, allowing you to add another time.

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I'll add another action at 9:45pm to allow for more bandwidth late at night, and then press Clear to clear the entry fields.

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You'll notice that times and actions are separated by commas; each time entry corresponds to the like positioned Action. Now I'll create a second Time Profile.

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On weekends, peak hours are different, so we'll have different settings for weekends.

Ok, so now we have some time profiles, so lets apply them to a rule. When you use time profiles, the time profiles will control the bandwidth settings, so any setting you put in the rule will be overruled. You can create a simple IP rule with the only settings being time profiles.

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You'll need to edit twice to add a second time profile.

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When you save the rule, you'll see the profile applied for the current time. It happens to be a weekend when I'm doing this, so the weekend profile is applied.

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Rules with time profiles will have a little gray clock icon appear at the end of the row. If you click on the icon, you can see the time profiles that are associated with the rule.

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bw_timemanager.php Daemon

In order for time rules to be enforced, you need to uncomment the utility in your crontab. It should be run every 15 minutes:

*/15 * * * * root /usr/bwmgr/utils/bw_timemanager debug

the "debug" parameter will print a lot of info in /var/log/bw_timemanager.log. You should remove it after you've gotten everything working.

That's it. The bw_timemanager utility runs in your crontab every 15 minutes and applies profiles when necessary. Note that time profiles are designed to manage a rule for entire days that they are active; if you apply 2 time profiles that are active on the same days they won't work as expected. Overlapping is not expected.

There is no logical limit on the number of profiles that can be assigned to a rule, or the number of time/action pairs that can be in a Time Profile, but the database field does have a fixed default size. If you have an unusual requirement, the field can be expanded; check with Emerging Technologies support for instructions on what you'd need to do.

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