[NCLUG] Re: DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[DJ Eshelman]

Heh.

Not to mention that the 'ping times' reported in most games aren't even 
a very good metric to begin with.  If you can't see the packet size, TTL 
and other data, it's impossible to determine latency.

Though I will say that recently I tried to implement a QoS solution (BSD 
pf based) that turned a p2p T1 with 6ms average latency into a 120 ms 
average latency line.  Sometimes, it really is your routers.

The one client we're having some major issues with right now has decided 
to open a 'branch office' of 2 employees in Texas, but wants to have all 
the files available to them down there from the main office here.
The problem is that they're a design firm, and CAD files can get pretty 
huge and they generally don't want to deal with compression.

The biggest problem with them is they can't justify a T-1 at either 
location, so they're stuck with DSL in both places.
I don't know how many of you have tried to run a Windows Server PPTP 
(VPN) connection site-to-site like that before but it's crazy slow 
because of exactly what John was talking about with dropped packets.  It 
basically takes what should look like I-25 and turns it into a Shanghai 
side road (just as many cars, just not as organized).  The scary thing 
is that we're actively talking about pushing port-to-port DFS (it would 
work better because it's bit-level, but security is incredibly 
compromised with those ports open like that).

I'll let you all know anything I find out on this that doesn't cost an 
arm+leg+firstborn.  Clients like this not willing to spend money for 
T-1s certainly aren't going to go for a $10,000 solution, but it's 
something of a hot topic for us right now.  I'm sure a $5,000 solution 
might fly as long as it was a one-time expense but I'm not smart enough 
to write something myself.  I'm just surprised I can't find an open 
source solution, given how widespread the problem is.

-DJ

Brian Wood wrote:
> John L. Bass wrote:
>
>   
>> You might be VERY vocal to your clients providers about the difficult
>> problems your clients are having with VPN access. It might provide some
>> balance to the very vocal P2P and gaming users that demand all you can eat.
>>     
>
> I talked to a bunch of gamers a while back, all they wanted to talk to
> me about was "ping time", though they showed absolutely no indication
> that they had any idea what that might mean, not that it is any sort of
> official metric anyway.
>
> Apparently some of the internet games show some sort of "ping time", and
> when it showed something "worse" than the other online gamers they would
> complain, even though they could not describe any other sort of problem.
>
> Most customers are not very technical, the problem with the gamers is
> that a lot of them seem to think they are :-)
>
> beww
>
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