Proxies break lots of things. Getting a handle on what's really sucking the bandwidth is important before throwing technical and political hurdles up to monitor/manage/mitigate it. It could be torrents. It could be just a couple of abusers. It could be streaming vid. It could be a growing number of virus-laden or zombie hosts spewing spam or other garbage.
A real cheap way to passively take a quick look is to put a 100M hub (not a switch) between the primary router and the first internal hop. Into that hub, plug a laptop that has Wireshark installed. A hub is $20-40 and Wireshark is free. That will allow analysis of everything going in/out of the net. That will provide information about what protocols and users are sucking the bandwidth. It can also identify what the top web sites are. Then if the situation warrants, a proxy might provide more detailed analysis and mitigation through policies. The above quick look might help decide if you need to spend lots of money for a commercial monitoring/management solution. ...Barb _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
