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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Napster and others...
Scott McGrath wrote: > I could create custom queues for it and discard when necessary like I do for non > business related web traffic rather than my current heavy handed ACL's If anyone > on the list has a alternate method I would appreciate hearing about it and my > users would love me for giving them back access to Napster and other music sites. I've been thinking and talking about this a lot with some of my peers in the University environment the last couple of weeks. Like yourself, I am trying to come up with a fairness policy and implementation based on technical limitations of IP and our network equipment. Some of the most important thoughts/conclusions I have had are as follows: Avoid mucking with TCP and end-to-end transparency as much as possible. Let IP and RFC 2581 do its job. Managing by UDP/TCP port is unreliable. All it takes is for someone to change configuration, find the next killer app or even more fun, implement some type of "port hopping" mechanism. I'm just waiting for this to happen. Using ToS fields *seems* to be the right approach to provide *some* of what we want. Coupled with something like WRED in our Cisco routers at the our Internet border. More sophisticated QoS mechanisms than that seems to be an effort in futility. KISS. I'm thinking a simple low priority, high priority ToS setting for packets that are either within or outside of the local definition of fair. For example, I like the idea where all packets exceeding an average rate of X bps get tagged low priority and dropped by WRED as necessary. Be prepared to find that by using ToS bits, you break something (see http://micro.uoregon.edu/macintosh/mactcp.html). You might be able to influence what comes into your network from the outside through these mechanisms, but you can't control them. You also can't count on any service guarantees past your administrative control. A few more good reasons to avoid anything overly complex. It is often easier and cheaper to just add bandwidth than trying to tweak utilization and apply QoS throughout your network. I'm having a hard time applying this fairness concept down to the user port level, if anyone has any thoughts or feedback, I'd appreciate it if you contact me (and also see my post in the unisog list). John
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