Thanks everyone... I should clarify a little more of what my worry is.

Specifically the 4 machines downloading updates at the exact same time and 
taking the internet connection to its knees probably isn't too realistic a 
scenario. We did do it in the middle of the night, so it can happen, but WSUS 
is probably not a solution to the overall problem I'm worried about (it's 
specific to the windows update problem). I am still blown away that this 
happened so easily though. Maybe I expected too much intelligence on the 
firewall to handle overloading? It just doesn't feel right.

I a more worried about the realistic scenarios where publishing could be 
downloading a few large files via web (say some artwork that's 200MB). Another 
user is streaming a video, another is ftping some files, etc... so the overall 
usage pegs the 1.5Mbit to it's max download (like the Microsoft Update did), 
and the whole thing stalls the internet again. This is what I am worried about. 
Or some similar combination of traffic and the firewall just sits there letting 
it saturate/stall everything.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm blaming the firewall... but I never thought a 
T1 would saturate and become useless with 4 computers downloading some large 
files. There must be a LOT of people having this problem then.

ChuckM




-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Mansfield [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 6:09 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [pfSense Support] RE: T1 Saturating - Windows update kills the 
connection... ??

put in a big squid proxy with a large disk cache, and or set up windows
clients to auto-download updates during the night so at least congestion
happens outside critical times

if you're using managed switches, can you throttle
back individual ports?

otherwise, traffic shaping may be your friend

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