Re: Traffic Management

["Alex Goldney" <agoldney () qantas com au>]

We have been thinking about the same sort of stuff, although we don't have
a problem yet.  I was never a Boy Scout, but 'be prepared' seems a good
matter :-)

Whatever you do, you need to know what your trafic profile is before you
attempt to control it.  There's multiple freeware tools out there that will
allow you to get a bit of a traffic profile.  Things like tcpstat are
pretty good.  Of course, you can also use NFR to get that info if you have
it installed using the TCP by connection stuff :-).

If most of your stuff is http the first thing you might want to try is a
caching proxy putting one of those in place will probably reduce the
requirement to access the internet for data significantly.
Next you might want to try putting in one of the URL filtering products.
SmartFilter is supposed to be pretty good and it works with most every
proxy you care to mention.  Of course, that might be considered too
draconian, it's depends on your organisation.

Other things you might want to try are products like packeteer that will
allow you to control bandwidth for various services/IP addresses etc.  I't
works well, we've tried it here.

If you don't like to pay, check out the QoS stuff available in recent
releases of Linux.  It is quite powerful and flexible, but you don't have
the luxury of a GUI.

If none of that works, well, you aren't a magician.  If the demand is all
legitimate traffic, you just have to upgrade the BW.

Alex.





From: bparis () sorrentolactalis com@nfr.com on 09/02/2001 11:55 EST

Sent by:  firewall-wizards-admin () nfr com


To:   firewall-wizards () fraggle nfr net
cc:
Subject:  [fw-wiz] Traffic Management


     Folks,

     Recently we've been experiencing "congestion" of our internet pipe.
We've tried restricting various thing like Napster, Gnutella and the like
with varying degrees of success, but as more and more users come onto our
LAN/WAN we've noticed our performance decreasing. Rather than manage this
at
our firewall (with many many rules), I'd like to know how you manage your
traffic. What do you use?

     I apologize if this question seems off topic, but thought I would
toss it out there and see what comes back...

Bill Paris
Telecommunication/Network Analyst
Sorrento Lactalis Inc.
bparis () sorrentolactalis com
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