[techtalk] Sick of surf and porn addicts

Kai MacTane kmactane at GothPunk.com
Fri May 25 10:57:21 EST 2001


At 5/25/01 05:22 AM , James Sutherland wrote:

>How big's the line in question?? Presumably it's not a particularly busy
>WWW site you host? If I understand you correctly, the problem is not the
>content they are downloading, but the fact they're using a large amount of
>bandwidth to do it?

This is really crucial. (Well done, Mr. Sutherland!) If the problem is 
porn, regardless of size, then the solutions would be completely different. 
However, if the problem is bandwidth being clogged, then you have a 
somewhat easier problem to solve.

>In particular, restricting the bandwidth used by big downloads could make
>a big difference: if you throttle all files over, say, 1 Mb, you may find
>things become a lot better overall. OK, those NT service packs and Linux
>ISOs will take a while to download, but they won't impact "normal" usage
>any more.

Yes, but those are legitimate downloads, and you could simply cache them on 
the proxy server, or keep local copies somewhere. (Indeed, if you're having 
trouble with bandwidth, you probably ought to do that anyway. Have a local, 
central repository for large software installs, including MSIE, Netscapes 
4.7 - 6.0, and pretty much anything else that anyone downloads to install. 
Even such things as ACDSee (a really cool image viewer) or Free Agent or 
WinAmp. All of it.

>Setting your mail server to block some or all attachments could be a big
>help here: if you do have a lot of mail traffic, attachments are probably
>a large part of that. Check first, though: do your users NEED attachments
>for anything? If so, you'll need to make some arrangement for that.
>Perhaps block only .EXE files and other "suspect" material?

.vbs, .com, .bat

Unfortunately, you probably can't get all your business partners to send 
you .rtf instead of .doc. (But if you could, it would really cut down on 
Word macro viruses!)

                                                 --Kai MacTane
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"When nothing's sacred any more,
  When the demon's knocking on your door,
  You're still staring down at the floor."
                                                 --The Chameleons UK,
                                                  "Swamp Thing"





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