Search the Community

All, I have been trying to reduce unneeded internet traffic at our site of late, due to poor speeds on the connection I noted a lot of traffic to Office online help – specifically officeimg.vo.msecnd.net Doing a bit of digging and it seems office 2010 and 2013 connect to this address automatically at startup and download stuff. At our site it was roughly 1 – 1.5 Gig a day! Changing the Office 2010 registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Internet\UseOnlineContent Or Office 2013 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Internet\UseOnlineContent To REG_DWORD value 0 Disables this and frees up that bit more bandwith I’ve pushed this out via Group Policy preferences, but you could just as easily use a login script or modify mandatory profiles. Hope this is helpful

Hello. I have a bit of an issue that needs pinpointing and I want to know if there is any free software that lets me monitor traffic of individual machines on our network? Thanks in advance.

On my home network when I run updates or download packages in Ubuntu I find that synaptic seems to steal all the network bandwidth... every last bit! My wife will complain that the internet "doesn't work" and I get disconnected from pidgin etc. How is this happening? If I download an iso or something in firefox it doesn't clog up the whole network so I don't understand how synaptic is managing it. Is there anyway I can cap the download speed for synaptic? I don't think I get the problem so badly using apt-get, but then I do more updates than fresh package installs.

I'm contemplating the options for making the best of a two site system with a slow (symmetric 2MB) link between them. Kids move around and may need access to their docs at the other site tomorrow, so we have overnight to play with. Is anyone using DFSR in practice for something like this? How is it? What can you get away with etc? I want to play with this on the lab bench. That may end up being virtual (ESX lets you limit bandwidth per VM), but if not does anyone know of a good, preferably free ,way to throttle bandwidth to emulate performance accross say a 2MB & 10MB links? If not free then 30-day trial will be long enough

Hi all, I'm after some advice for our school CCTV server. Setup: Hardware: Dell R510, 8gb ram (on average 4gb used), 12TB set to raid 1 storage (so we get great write speed), two gigabit Nic's(only one is currently used to pull data from cameras) Software: Windows Server 2012, Luxriot Evo S Switches: Cisco 3750's Problem: The server and software works well and the ram, cpu doesn't seem to be straining under average load, but the video playback isn't as smooth as we'd like. The past few months I've been eliminating possible bottlenecks,which had led to my concluding its a network bandwidth issue. By my calculations, if I have 85 cameras feeding my server 4Mbps a second, I need at least 340Mbps of bandwidth. I obviously can't get that with a single gigabit connection (it seems to hit 200Mbps and not go any further, as that's a limit for gigabit connection). So my plan is to activate the other nic and have dual gigabit to help with the bandwidth load from all the cameras. The problem is, I'm not sure the best way to go about this: Should I team up the ports on the Cisco switch? Or should I have half my cameras use 10.110.100.x and the other have use 10.110.101.x? What do you guys think? Thanks for any advice you could give.

I've disabled the Store, and configured my Windows 10 clients to check our local WSUS server for updates, defer Feature Updates for 365 days, prevented deferral policies from causing scans against Windows Update, prevented connection to any WIndows Update Internet locations, and removed access to use all Windows Update features. I am still seeing 300GB of traffic per day from subdomains of tlu.dl.delivery.mp.microsoft.com.What else can I do to kill this traffic? Would blocking these domains on the Smoothwall cause problems?

I have a domain using up a huge amount of bandwidth on our network. officecdn.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net It appears to be a genuine Microsoft update site by the looks of it but its used nearly 150GB data in the last 24hrs. So far I've put a heavy bandwidth throttle on it via our Smoothwall. Its only started happening in the last couple of working days. Has anyone seen this before ? Cheers in advance

We have a Meru wireless network, with 3 security profiles. One uses Radius for our school owned devices that live in AD, one uses WPA for things like iPads and one is a 'guest network' using captive portal login with Radius authentication for our students to use. Each of these has its own VLAN. As more and more students are connecting with their own devices on the guest network, we're noticing that network connectivity on all devices whatever they're connecting to is slowing down. Can anyone offer advice about monitoring the Meru traffic? Firstly I'd like to confirm that it is the sheer number of devices that's causing the problem, and secondly can we limit the bandwidth available to student devices, or prioritise the bandwidth somehow without having to buy extra modules/software? Much appareciated!

I run an IT department in a large boarding school on the south coast. At our Senior School, we have 800 students, around 300 are boarders and 200 staff. We have spent the last two years upgrading our network after years of no investment. New servers, PCs, additional cabling, fibre between buildings, upgraded HP switches, increased broadband connectivity, Meraki APs, 2 x Smoothwall Firewalls, etc. I understand this is a dream for some schools as I previously worked in a school with practically zero budget. However, with this comes other challenges! Many of our boarders have at least three wifi devices. All our staff and students wifi traffic has to be authenticated and we stop VPN traffic other than SSL. We use Office365, but all other educational services are on site at the moment. Most days over 1500 users are logged into wifi (staff and students). In one boarding house alone, I have over 500 wifi clients connected split over 5 APs! 75% of our traffic is MAC/iOS, 12% Windows and the rest is Android and other devices. We have one 1Gb school2school link between our senior and off site prep school, then we have a 1Gb connection from the Prep which is a DR line and are in the middle of replacing the existing 100Mb and 300Mb connections at the Senior School with 1Gb and 1Gb connections. I am just waiting for contracts to come up this year. This will mean less traffic will need to cross the school2school link. Currently our 100Mb connection is reserved for telephony traffic and the remaining traffic is split across the 1Gb and 300Mb connections. Looking at the Meraki geographic access point chart, only a handful of devices were showing over-use and so more have been placed in these areas (such as the 500+ users above). Our wifi traffic, which is predominantly our area of contention, is processing 7.5 Tb of data per day (average over 12 months). Because we still have around 30 old APs to replace for Meraki, we haven't yet been able to implement any of the management tools that might help us, although through the cloud console, we discovered one student had downloaded 250Gb of data in one evening! Others were downloading in excess of 50Gb in that same evening. We have therefore put 1Mb/sec limits on 4HD and gaming traffic to allow other students half a chance of even getting on the wifi! I am interested to hear from other schools to hear what they do around quotas, restricting devices and/or traffic types. I am also keen to know what other schools are doing to manage high levels of traffic. Is our traffic typical for boarding schools? I previously worked in commercial organizations and never saw this level of traffic day after day (peaks, yes but not constant). I appreciate there are probably much more experienced infrastructure guys on this forum, so I am putting a message out there to you guys.... I would appreciate other schools in a similar position to PM me to share some information in order that I might see if our situation is typical and check we aren't missing any major tricks to get a handle on this! Thanks in advance

This is our total upload/download per day for the past week. We have 1,100-ish users. 1Gb up/down leased line. What about others... what does you bandwidth usage look like?

Hey All, So, we are with RM, we have 100Mbps leased line. At this school, mot mornings there is a real lack of speed. It looks intitally like a DNS issue but isn't. - Speaking with RM, they are saying that the bandwidth utilisation is 100%. They also say that the service utilising this bandwidth is "Google Update". The odd thing is that it happens early morning and settles at lunch time. - We cannot see anything on this network that even remotely looks like this anywhere on the network. Any advice would be brilliant, this school is really suffering! PS - We have just had all except the core switches changed from Cisco to Ubiquiti. Could be something or nothing.

Hi all, I have been suffering terrible internet connectivity and after a log chat with my LEA and ISP it turns out that my bandwidth is being saturated with iplayer and streaming media requests. I am on a 10mb connection. Unfortunatley/Fortunatley a significant number of teaching staff use IMDB iplayer and all number of other streaming media sites for legitimate use during lessons (especially music and media studies) I have been using OpenBSD for some time and was thinking about using the inbuilt packet filter system "pf" to priortise and shape the traffic headed in and out of the internet connection. the Plan is to use the ALTQ feature of "pf" to set all TCP traffic with a high priority and then to set HTTP IMAP POP etc with a higher priority using the CBQ method of queueing, and to also allow the HTTP que to "borrow upto 90% of the general TCP traffic queue when that que is under utilised. If any of that makes sense to you and you have implimeneted such a system I would like to know of any pit falls that you may have encountered along the way ! I am still just planning the procedure but I can post updates is people are interested.

Hi all, I've fairly recently put in a Mac which is a secondary Papercut server for Ipads. I've just run a report from my firewall (smoothwall) to investigate bandwidth consumption. The second biggest bandwith usage is reported as coming from the Mac @ 12gb last week. Any ideas what its doing. Its pretty vanilla and as it came out of the box. (I am no Mac expert!)

Just wanted to explain our situation, see if anyone else is having the same problems and if anyone has a solution! We are a large Primary school and have just switched from Windows 10 to a mixture of Chromebooks and Laptops running CloudReady. We also have the Wonde logins set up which works really well. However, when the Chromebooks started being used in classes last week we started having problems with really slow logins (something that I didn't think would be a problem with Chromebooks). After further investigation, it appears that the Play Store and Extensions are installed per user. If a class of 25 are logging on to Chromebooks at the same time then there is a bottleneck at our APs and it also uses up all our bandwidth on our leased line. I have therefore temporarily disabled the Play Store and larger extensions (more than a few mb). Disabling these things now means that logging on is fine again. However, this does cause a problem. One of the attractions of using Chromebooks is the ability to use Android Apps. This would be great if the Play Store, Android Apps and extensions were downloaded once and stored on the device. However, they are downloaded per user so every time a user logs in to any Chromebook it has to pull down all of those things which then clogs up our network. We have decent Switches and APs (not ac) and 100MB Leased Line. I'm guessing there are no easy solutions to this but any advice is appreciated!