Re: Streaming (anything)

["Michael R. Jinks" <mjinks saecos com>]

Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:

> "Michael R. Jinks" wrote:
>
>
> > At the worst case, use tcpdump(8) on one of the routing machines while
> > using the offensive programs, and just note the ports that they use.
>
>
>     That's what I thought too...blah.

What blah?  If you want the truth, look for yourself; documentation 
lies.  ;)  And tcpdump is your own true friend.



> > Just out of curiosity, why do you need to block these services specifically?
>
>
>     Because we're having employees sitting on their computers, listening to the
> radio, listening to tv broadcasts over real player, or some other crap through media
> player.  It's clogging our line.  So, "upstairs" gave me authorization to block all
> of them.

Aha.  Okay, platitude imminent:  Technology is ill-suited for solving 
social and legal problems.  Has Upstairs banned these activities?  Then 
this is an HR problem, not a sysadmin problem.  Remember that if you 
have clever users, they can find ways around filtering measures that you 
put on the router.  There are also (actually, I assume that there are) 
streaming protocols that run through port 80/HTTP.  Pretty sure you 
can't afford to block that.

What about gathering packet statistics at the router (MRTG?  Something 
Else?) and using that information either to confront the users 
([pointing at pretty graph] "THIS is why our net connection is so slow 
and our connectivity charges are so high.") or to narrow down 
conclusively what the bandwidth drain is, and block those ports/IP's?


--
~~~Michael Jinks, IB // Technical Entity // Saecos Corporation~~~~