Traffic Shaping/Bandwidth Limiting to Internet

[SCLDTony]

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the right forum, but I will start here.

I have a WAN spread over ten sites. For internet use, it's hub/spoke. Nine of the sites come back through their own dedicated 10mb link to the main site. The internet link is a 20mb dedicated line from the main site. It is protected by a PIX 515. All the equipment is Cisco. 2800 series routers on the edge and a 3845 in the main site. The switches are all Cisco as well.

I have two vlan's. We are a public library. One vlan is for staff. The other is for public. The public internet access consists of wired and wireless machines and is hammering our 20mb line out to the internet.

I have been asked to look into traffic shaping/bandwidth limiting for the public vlan. I am curious about best practices. I am thinking that maybe I need an ISA or Squid proxy in front of the firewall for the public vlan. I am not concerned with the traffic on the lines internal to the WAN. Just the internet line out from the main site.

Has anyone successfully limited bandwidth for certain applications/protocols (such as bittorrent, flash, mp3, kazaa, etc) with a network similiar to mine? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Tony

 

[Atavar]

OK, people are going to accuse me of spamming, but really I have no connection with what I am going to recommend. Take a look at the Allot Net Enforcer.. it is made to do exactly what you want to do from a simple GUI. For a 20mb link the box is fairly expensive, but it is really a sweet way to do the task.

You can set up Quality of Service (QoS) with the Cisco hardware you have without spending any more money, but it will be a very involved and admin intensive task.