Re: Speeds and feeds

[Bennett Todd <bet () rahul net>]

It definitely sounds like the T1 is saturating --- but it would never
hurt to more-positively document that. If you can get router statistics
on line utilization that would help.

Given that they're using up the T1, one good question is, do they want
to buy more bandwidth? If so then by all means do so. But people doing
big downloads can saturate _anything_ (I know --- I like to do tricks
like mirror the entire Red Hat site:-).

So if other users are noticing degraded response, I'd look into
bandwidth management solutions. Cisco has some traffic shaping options
for recent IOS releases, there's dummynet[1] (for FreeBSD --- freely
available) and the Bandwidth Manager[2] (for FreeBSD, BSDI, and NetBSD,
$500).

And worst comes to worst, you may well be able to do the deed if you
force the big downloaders to go through a separate set of proxies, and
put a mechanism in place --- e.g. a slip line running at 115kbps --- to
throttle their bandwidth.

-Bennett

[1] <URL:http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/>
[2] <URL:http://www.etinc.com/bwmgr.htm>