Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 14:57:51 -0600
From: David Farmer 
Reply-To: farmer@umn.edu
To: net-people@tc.umn.edu
Subject: Re: Packeteer/Internet Bandwidth problems

Since this has finally hit net-people, now I will respond:

First, if people are still experiencing traffic problems please let me
know.

Second, yes I know my email address is up on a web page, thank you
for my 15 minutes of fame. :)

The net-people discussions of a month a go were only that,
discussions of an interesting problem.

It was never anyone's intentions to impact users to the extent that
happened.

There were two technical issues:

1. There was a software bug in the Packeteer that caused bad
performance for all Http, Ftp, and Mail traffic for all of campus not just
the Dorms.

2. There were unforeseen and unintended consequence of the trial
policies for the dorms that caused very bad performance for at most
%20 of the dorm users, most likely much less than that.  But the
people effected we very badly effected.  Without getting into too many
details, I believe that the daily hostile scans of the University caused
an overflow of a configured limit in the Packeteer, that caused the bad
performance for the unlucky few.

I'm going to limit my comments to that for now, buy me a beer (hard
cider actually) and I might have more to say.

=====================================================
David Farmer                            Email:  farmer@umn.edu
Office of Information Technology
University of Minnesota                 Phone:  612-626-0815
2218 University Ave SE                  Cell:   612-812-9952
Minneapolis, MN 55414-3029              FAX:    612-624-4035
=====================================================