1. I think you should force all outbound to go through a daily authenticated proxy, so that there is a clear connection between originating IP and individual users. 2. To me this is the very similar to dealing with disk hogs. Make a list of your bandwidth hogs. Decide on objective metrics that you will use to declare the hogs (connect time? MB downloaded?). 3. Based on those metrics, decide on the threshold that will be considered excessive. 4. Inform the population about the problem (bandwidth at peak endangers business need traffic). Inform the population that excessive bandwidth use will automatically be reported to management. 5. After some culling for false positives (e.g., somebody downloading GB of EDA applications legitimately), start reporting the excessive use to appropriate management. Do it in small manageable batches (e.g., here are your top ten Internet users this week). Some managers will be genuinely surprised and will decide that some of the employees have extra time on their hands. The problem will be mitigated.
--- On Wed, 4/29/09, Jeremy Charles <[email protected]> wrote: From: Jeremy Charles <[email protected]> Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Buy More Internet versus Mitigating Internet Use To: "Lopsa Discuss" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 3:07 PM I don't want to get on yet another salesdroid's radar, so I'm asking the community instead. :-) We're repeatedly faced with a situation where we purchase more Internet capacity, our employees eventually oversubscribe it, we buy more, lather, rinse, repeat. Currently, we're purchasing 40 Mbps of Internet from our ISP, and the ISP's router guy tells me that his router typically sees about 60 Mbps of traffic actually trying to come to us. (We're mostly an eyeball network.) I'm tempted to look in to purchasing something like a Websense product or other mechanism for, shall we say, reducing the appetite for non-business Internet use during prime business hours. The big question I first want to get a feel for is: Will the cost of the system be made up in terms of reduced need to purchase more Internet capacity? Would anybody mind sharing order-of-magnitude numbers on what you had to pay in order to get something that did a good job at this and how much reduction in Internet usage you think it resulted in? Yes, I realize that you also have to factor in things like lost productivity due to web surfing, security risks that the device could also reduce, etc. That's all fine and good, but it's rather impossible to put those concepts in to hard numbers that I can put on a purchase proposal. I need something that I can sell to Layer 8, which is currently running in "cost paranoid" mode. ---- Jeremy Charles Epic's Computer and Technology Services Division [email protected] Phone: 608-271-9000 Fax: 608-410-5961 _______________________________________________ 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/
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