Reserve Bandwidth

[Zen216]

Hello all,
Newbie here, so I am sorry in advance if this is redundant..
We currently have a T-1 for our internet traffic, aqnd a pix-515 firewall and cisco 2621 router.
We have two developers that remote in from their homes via a PcAnywhere connection.
The problem is that with normal Inet traffic, some users listening to streaming radio, and marketing dept uploading and downloading videos, the t-1 gets pegged and the developers cannot work becasue of the latency...

I was hoping I could reserve a % of the bandwidth, so that the developers would be the only ones to be able to use this portion of the bandwidth,,,
That way they can always work, and the rest of the users will have to make due with what they have left over....

Thanks All..

 

[burtsbees]

CAR with policy maps, QoS.

Burt

 

[BuckWeet]

You would have to apply an 'inbound' CAR policy so that video/radio traffic would get dropped on the ingress from the internet. This won't fully solve the problem. Once these drops occur, the PCs on your side will tell the remote side that they didn't get the packets and will requst a retrans.. However, TCP should throttle down the speed on the connections because of these drops..


BuckWeet

 

[burtsbees]

CAR with policy maps (or policy based routing, PBR) would work just fine, in my opinion.

Burt

 

[Belushi]

Burt, I'm going to have to disagree with CAR as a solution. Not that it won't work because it will, but why implement something that is opposite the direction Cisco has moved to for QoS. The better bet, in my opinion of course, is class based shaping or policing. MQC (Modular QoS CLI) is the direction Cisco has taken for the past several years . They have even removed CAR from their QoS tests.

 

[burtsbees]

That's true---there is a term for the newer way that implements a CAR-like config with class maps and policy maps...I can't think of it though...lol

Burt

 

[lerdalt]

Think I'd also start looking into some content filtering systems to help restrict the streaming radio. I know I enjoy watching movie trailers...especially when the internet connection at work was faster than what I had at home, but I really hate troubleshooting a busy circuit when someone is streaming audio/video.

Although it is fun to track the device down to a person and call them up saying "please stop streaming video from xxxx, you are taking all the internet bandwidth and preventing others from working"

 

[rodjor]

You could use an access-list to drop packets incoming on ports for example port 554 RSTP.

 

[burtsbees]

I think they still need streaming video (he brings the example of his marketing dept.), so access-lists won't do.

Burt

 

[rodjor]

Are you departments broken down by VLANs?

 

[Zen216]

Rodjor... no they are not. I am very new to cisco equipment. We have a stack of catalyst 3500's, and I just put IP's on them about a month ago and started to "poke around" (They have been on the network for 8 yrs, and have never had an ip assigned or passowrds) The current admin farms everything related to the switches and routers to a 3rd party company. His answer to the above question was to just hire a company to examine the router/network to find what is using the bandwidth...
I do not want to do anything that might F up the network, so have been poking around with kid gloves...

Burt, you are correct, marketing dept. still needs to be able to upload/download video files as well as streaming video..

We average about 1Mb usage, and only sometimes peg the full T, which was why I was thinking of reserving about 25-30% for the programmers,,,,
I have been doing some research on the CAR and MQC... unfortunately also have lots of fires burning during the day to try and put out,,,

We have an extra router, so once I get some more time, I will start fooling around with the spare,, that way I can't really F it up...lol


Thanks

 

[lerdalt]

If you are just needing to see what is taking up the bandwidth, look at enabling netflow on the router. Also I like to enable the top talkers whenever possible. Neither are service impacting, won't f anything up, and will give you lots of information back on what is running when the utilization is high. For me, netflow has been a life saver. When I start to see servers sending lots of data, I can just send the table of the conversation and how many bytes to the server folks and ask them what the server is doing.

I'd look first at trying to manage the outbound connections and eliminating or blocking whatever you can there first...that might free up more than enough for everything else.

Don't forget to also look at CBWFQ, I think it's a little better than CAR for outbound traffic.