Most of you have probably heard of or seen a Packeteer . Now some of you have had the pleasure of using a packeteer. What I want to know is if there is a way to avoid the high costs of purchasing a packeteer and creating my own.

I dont want to invest very much money into this at all but I would like to use one of my existing computers (install any flavor of OS...ie. linux, windows...etc) I want the ability to both see what kind of traffic is going on in my network and on the same note I also want to be able to limit traffic, use it to help block ports, and stop different forms of traffic.

Background info:

This will be used in my home network
I can have a dedicated machine to do this
I would prefer it to run like this cable modem>router>packet machine>switch>internal network
or modem>shaper>router>internal network

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated