Anyone know anything about bandwidth shapers?

holiday247

I'm looking at bandwidth shaping appliances (netequalizer, packeteer, etc.) for a university network with around 5,000 users. Anyone had experience with this kind of thing. I need it to control P2P traffic when the network gets congested. thanks.

bushy...

I pm'd you a few links

RangeR

Why not share those links with the rest of us?

Kernel

Only fascists use such software!

holiday247

Thanks for the links.

zAbbo

smoothwall with some mods.

Surely for a Uni nw with 5000 users, you'd disable p2p ?

holiday247

We're not trying to block P2P, just prevent it from eating up the bandwidth and causing congestion for all of the other users. So we want to regulate rather than ban.

christophicus

Which Uni is this can I ask?

Sponge Bob

christophicus wrote:

Which Uni is this can I ask?

Maynooth

useruser

I have used both Allot and Packeteer, of the 2, Allot definitely had the better product. I have also heard good things about Sandvine. That said, these are difficult to deploy and manage in anything other than a very simple network, if you have asymmetric routing, non-ethernet links, redundant routers etc. etc. then it all becomes much more tricky and you may be better looking at individual subscriber management products along the lines of a BRAS (Redback (now Ericsson) /Juniper ERX/ all the usual vendors)

gogreen

You may be on the right track with Netequalizer. We've been using it for a few years with our network and it's worked well against P2P downloads. It doesn't block them, but just gives certain large file types (music, movies) lower priority when the network gets congested. Basically, they have less bandwidth to work with during times of high traffic but still can continue their downloads, just at a slower pace. People surfing the net and sending e-mail, which is the large majority of users, get the higher priority in these cases. When the network isn't busy, users can download as much as they want without any regulation. I hope that makes sense.

irishpartyboy

Fortinet Appliances

It's extensively used in dept of education / schools in Ireland. Does QOS / packet shaping all the bells & whistles. Actually had a conversation yesterday with an Irish Company who have rolled out 18 of these appliances accross Ireland and the UK.

Excellent reports.

Redisle

Eh, I really despise that fortinet.. can access **** all in school, the thing about fortinet is that it blocks absolutely everything until you tell it its ok..
It has all these annoying categories for websites and everything gets categorised.. then the it manager or similar can choose which caregories to allow and which to block. I have not been able to get around the system in any way which is probably a very good sign its doing what it should be.. ive tried various proxies but being on a pos mac os 9.1 computer dosent help much. Im not sure thats what the op is looking for unless he disabled the website filtering.
But one thing is for sure that fortinet works and works too well.

msmx5

holiday247 wrote:

I'm looking at bandwidth shaping appliances (netequalizer, packeteer, etc.) for a university network with around 5,000 users.

I've heard the Astaro appliance is ment to be good too. I believe you gane get a free triall. http://www.astaro.com/solutions/network_protection

[BTW I've absolutely no connection with Astaro]

holiday247

Thanks for the responses. Any idea on what these solutions cost?

gogreen

Netequalizers run anywhere from $2,000-8,000, depending on the model you get. There's a price list at the web site: http://www.netequalizer.com/neteqpricelist.php

holiday247

I ended up putting in an order for a neteq. and it's been working well so far (one week in). I'll let you know if any problems pop up.

ROS123

Sorry if this is a stupid question but would it work in the following scenario. We have a leased line and a dsl line aggregated into a sonicwall firewall. could I attach a neteq to the inside of this or would I need two neteqs one on the dsl and L Line ?

gogreen

The two lines need to be completed and balanced before they hit the NetEq. If not then you would need two neteq's.

John1000

Does anyone know if trafic shapers work when bittorrent is using
transport encryption?

watty

They can do, yes.

It depends on traffic shapping method. Some ISPs do no traffic shaping at all, but throttle your connection if you are over the cap.

juliuspret

zabbo wrote:

smoothwall with some mods.

Surely for a Uni nw with 5000 users, you'd disable p2p ?

Hahaha!!

From experience I know that in one University at least that closeing all the ports and using a proxy is the preferred optionfor stopping low-medium technical people from P2P but its very difficult to stop those with Engineering/Comp backgrounds!

gogreen

John1000 wrote:

Does anyone know if trafic shapers work when bittorrent is using
transport encryption?

John, our NetEq. has been able to contain most bittorrents by limiting total connections although not a complete block. Either way, it's effective and seems to be immune to encrytpion techniques. I'm not sure if there are products out there that give a complete block or not.