SmoothWall: Bandwith Management per site/domain

[jpaterson]

Hello folks,

Can anyone offer some input in to this?...

Our school use a Smoothwall Advanced Firewall 2008, with SmoothGuardian and SmoothTraffic. We allow pupils to access games sites (miniclip, etc) at break times and during computer club hours. However, when they are accessing these, sites they take up a quite a bit of our available bandwith.

I was wondering it is possible to use SmoothTraffic to reduce bandwidth for specific sites, in effect making them slower / less of a bandwidth priority during these selected times?

Thanks!

Jay
(Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow)

[jpaterson]

After futher reading of the manual, I see that I can carry out this task in Guardian, using "Bandwidth Limiting".

Many thanks to all that had a look!

Jay

[tom_newton]

Sorry, been afk half the day and did not spot your thread!

Let me know how you get on.

[bwarren33]

jpaterson,

Did you get this to work?


I am looking into limiting the bandwidth on a few sites as well but it does not seem to be working for me.

In the bandwidth limiting menu I have kh.google.com limited to 15. Which is to limit the use of Google earth. However, When I check the real time traffic logs, kh.google.com is seeing upto 1.4mbps.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[tom_newton]

Did you check "share bandwidth" on?
Otherwise the limit refers to "per connection" - so a lot of clients could be accessing that one domain.

[bwarren33]

no shared bandwidth is not checked... I don't really want to use shared. I know it it not a bunch of users at the same time..

real time traffic shows me that an ip address is using a x amount of bandwidth so I go check the real time web filter and that ip address is only accessing kh.google.com which should only be getting very little bandwidth.

I am still testing this out. It every well might be something I have not done correctly..

[tom_newton]

Is that user definitely going via the proxy?
Try checking "shared bandwidth" anyway just for a bit of fun - if no other users are going to that site, it *should* make little difference - tho this one IP may be using multiple connections (which might fox the bandwidth limits.. I don't remember exactly how it works)

[bwarren33]

I have figured out a little bit of info as to what is going on with the bandwidth limiting.. As for Google Earth it has to do with the fact that the main url used is kh.google.com, some of the content comes from other urls, such as mw#.google.com. From the testing I have done, with a limit of 15 for kh.google.com the traffic graph was showing a max speed of about 150kbps which is fine. So am I confusing speeds, KBps and Kbps? As said it does seem to be limiting the bandwidth.

[tom_newton]

I'll have a looksee on monday and see if it is Bytes or bits.

[bwarren33]

Tom,

Have you found out anything? I am still unable to get the bandwidth limiting to work, at least they way I want it to...

What I am really wanting to accomplish is to block videos from sites like mtv.com, vh1.com, music.com, cmt.com. I am seeing a good bit of bandwidth being wasted, and some of the content of the videos on these sites could be deemed questionable. However, I do not want to block these sites completely because there is good content. So is there a good way to block only the videos on these sites?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

[tom_newton]

Sorry - got sidetracked and forgot to do this for you yesterday

It is definitely a limit in bytes.

I will get one of our blocklist guys to liaise with you on how best to deal with these sites. PM me your details so we can contact you by phone/email and we will work out our next steps.

Tom

[bwarren33]

Would the fact that a site is white listed be a reason that the bandwidth limiting is not working.. I have some sites white listed and I am also wanting to limit their bandwidth usage.. Any thoughts on this?

thanks