We have two buildings connected through a leased T1 line (half voice, half data), and are looking for a bandwidth throttling solution or some method of controlling and/or monitoring the traffic.
We are moving most of our staff, including everybody in one building to a new facility that we already own, so restructuring or otherwise heavy modification of our current configuration isn’t really an option.
In general, the bandwidth between the buildings is fast enough. Only email and some internet traffic and four citrix users come across that line.
A good example of our problem is something I encountered today. We have our MS office products installed and running off of administrative installation points. Today, I took a PC previously built for this office and brought it downtown. Altho I re-installed Word 2000, it still opened files from our server and not the server downtown. The extra traffic knocked our Citrix users offline (or more likely, caused unbelieveable lag, and being the impatient ppl they are, they probably went nuts hitting buttons and rebooted). I would like to find a cost effective way to monitor and detect events like this, so if someone is abusing their internet access or email access, we can address these problems specifically.
Does anybody have suggestions for something like a QoS router or my thought is to possibly use a Linux box with firewalling installed but not configured. I have seen specs and demonstrations on the Packeteer product, which sounds like a good solution, but something we will not really need in the the new building. We just need something to guarentee our contractors using Citrix just a sliver of bandwidth to keep them connected.