WebJunction

Now that summer has arrived and our public PC’s are being heavily utilized, I think we are hitting the limits of our bandwidth. We have a number of patrons playing videos while looking at Myspace and doing other bandwidth intensive things. I am looking for a way to put an upper limit on the amount of bandwidth that any particular patron can consume on a PC, but I am not sure how to accomplish this.

Adding a second cable modem would mean all sorts of network grief and extra cost, and filtering out or blocking Myspace and videos is pretty much out of the question (though part of me would love to do that!), so just about all I can see is bandwidth control.

All of our PC’s reach the internet through a PIX firewall and out to a cable modem. If anyone else has encountered this situation and found a viable solution, I would appreciate your advice.

Thanks,
Wendell

S/D offers a product, "Live Network" from the following company: http://www.cymphonix.com/

I have not worked with the PIX products in several years, but generally, Cisco built most of the quality of service (QoS) functions into the router rather than the firewall. This may have changed, but from a quick poke around the Cisco site, it looks rather limited as to what you could do with the firewall versus the router.

The OSS options listed on the Wikipedia are another bet.

Unfortunately, it seems, as usual, to come down to choosing two of the three: fast, cheap, or easy.

A couple questions:
where would you say your level of comfort with OSS technology is?
I messed around with a OSS firewall called Smoothwall - it had all sorts of modules, including bandwidth "shaping" / "throttling" that could be added to it relatively easily (you have to recompile the kernel). More info at http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7922&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

You can also purchase their QoS product from their commercial side, but it looks fairly pricey, although the other commercial products are also in this range or more based on my limited experience from a couple years ago:
http://www.smoothwall.net/products/smoothtraffic3/

Do you have any budget for either purchasing some type of appliance and/or implementing a solution if you found an OSS-based solution?

Something we ran into that looked like a bandwidth problem -- someone sitting on our WiFi network using his/her laptop for filesharing. Not much was getting out of the building because so much was trying to get in!