email i just got from a user

[sourceninja]

I'm in charge of our filtering where I work. So far I've been able to circumvent every single system that a vendor has brought into our company in a matter of 5 or 10 minutes. And that is without using ssh tunnels (which we have to keep open). What we have found works best is just QoS rather then filtering. Sure you can stream music, but it is going to be almost unbearable.

Kind like youtube, you can get to it, but it takes about 25 minutes to watch a 2 minute clip.

 

[sdifox]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
I'm in charge of our filtering where I work. So far I've been able to circumvent every single system that a vendor has brought into our company in a matter of 5 or 10 minutes. And that is without using ssh tunnels (which we have to keep open). What we have found works best is just QoS rather then filtering. Sure you can stream music, but it is going to be almost unbearable.

Kind like youtube, you can get to it, but it takes about 25 minutes to watch a 2 minute clip.

Winnar!

 

[iamwiz82]

I just got an email from a user with a screenshot of an error in IE (info bar :roll and what is in the background? A document called MaryKay.doc, nice...

 

[finite automaton]

I thought MOM alerts were for exchange related issues.. how does a playstation have anything to do with exchange?

 

[OutHouse]

Originally posted by: finite automaton
I thought MOM alerts were for exchange related issues.. how does a playstation have anything to do with exchange?

MOM can monitor ANYTHING on the wire. we are lucky the other admin i work with is a scripting wiz and has made all sorts of nifty alerts.

we use it to monitor the network, sql servers, specific apps that have to be running 24/7 just about every critical process we have is monitored by MOM including exchange.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

how much bandwidth could the ps3 possibly be using? Let em play man.

 

[OutHouse]

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim
how much bandwidth could the ps3 possibly be using? Let em play man.

:thumbsup:

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
In order words, he's looking for proxy sites to bypass your web filter right about now.

those are blocked too.

Until he creates a proxy on his home computer.

That's how I spent my senior year of HS, surfing whatever site I wanted on my tablet (since we had wifi). Downloading tons of pr0n, surfing random sites, reading up on every article on tomshardware and AT, reading up on stuff at howstuffworks.com, etc.

Was the single best year of school ever.

 

[bonkers325]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
I'm in charge of our filtering where I work. So far I've been able to circumvent every single system that a vendor has brought into our company in a matter of 5 or 10 minutes. And that is without using ssh tunnels (which we have to keep open). What we have found works best is just QoS rather then filtering. Sure you can stream music, but it is going to be almost unbearable.

Kind like youtube, you can get to it, but it takes about 25 minutes to watch a 2 minute clip.

/thread

give them their freedom, one agonizing kilobyte at a time. theres no reason to hog bandwidth by streaming retarded videos on youtube or browsing facebook/myspace photos.

if they want to listen to music, its likely that they already own an mp3 player - just tell them to plug it directly into their speakers

 

[Linflas]

When I worked at the Pentagon doing support for OpNav/SecNav I got a ticket from a SecNav guy regarding us blocking streaming. You could tell the guy was SecNav (political side) because he wrote up the ticket along the lines of "Is there any plan to unblock streaming from sites such as NPR or was it going to remain blocked such that he could not listen to programming vital to his job function such as NPR's latest series on Women in the Military?" We closed it telling him no and that he was free to listen to all the NPR programming he wished to listen to on the 2 PBS broadcast stations in DC just across the river and that all he had to do is tune an FM radio to 88.5 or 90.7.

 

[OutHouse]

Originally posted by: Linflas
When I worked at the Pentagon doing support for OpNav/SecNav I got a ticket from a SecNav guy regarding us blocking streaming. You could tell the guy was SecNav (political side) because he wrote up the ticket along the lines of "Is there any plan to unblock streaming from sites such as NPR or was it going to remain blocked such that he could not listen to programming vital to his job function such as NPR's latest series on Women in the Military?" We closed it telling him no and that he was free to listen to all the NPR programming he wished to listen to on the 2 PBS broadcast stations in DC just across the river and that all he had to do is tune an FM radio to 88.5 or 90.7.

hahaha, nice story.

 

[alkemyst]

this is why most toner monkey's never make it to network admin. They burn too many bridges just showing up for work.

The users are your customers...as stupid as they may be. If they were all knowledgable you would not have much of a job.

We used to allow streaming video, then we cut it back to audio only....now we have too many people and although we have a pretty fat pipe we could not even buy the bandwidth we'd need to let everyone do this. So we had to set a policy.

When someone has a special video they'd like to present, it's not a big deal to open a hole in the network so they can grab it.

If it were up to me I wouldn't block anything on my own...I'd allow the business to let me know what they'd like as policy.

 

[sdifox]

Originally posted by: IcebergSlim
how much bandwidth could the ps3 possibly be using? Let em play man.

nice gig to get, get paid to play ps3 in the office!

 

[skace]

I was all for the network guys blocking streaming and bandwidth intensive stuff. Then they went out of control and blocked everything. Can't even read a gamespy article at lunch anymore, what a bummer. All sites related to gaming or having anything to do about gaming (such as, a site that reviews gaming hardware) are blocked. Only thing left is anandtech and wikipedia.

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: skace
I was all for the network guys blocking streaming and bandwidth intensive stuff. Then they went out of control and blocked everything. Can't even read a gamespy article at lunch anymore, what a bummer. All sites related to gaming or having anything to do about gaming (such as, a site that reviews gaming hardware) are blocked. Only thing left is anandtech and wikipedia.

We will get to those eventually. Thanks for the heads up!

Sincerely,

Your friendly IT guy.





MotionMan

 

[rasczak]

OK this is a bit off topic, but here goes. What network monitoring tools do you use? I'm fairly new to the network admin scene, (the current network I set I built from the ground up but it's a closed system so not internet traffic whatsoever) I'd like to know though what tools you guys use so i can get familiar with some of them in case i needed to move to a new project.

Thanks!

 

[SunnyD]

Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

 

[finite automaton]

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: finite automaton
I thought MOM alerts were for exchange related issues.. how does a playstation have anything to do with exchange?

MOM can monitor ANYTHING on the wire. we are lucky the other admin i work with is a scripting wiz and has made all sorts of nifty alerts.

we use it to monitor the network, sql servers, specific apps that have to be running 24/7 just about every critical process we have is monitored by MOM including exchange.

That sounds like neat stuff

 

[ultimatebob]

Originally posted by: Citrix

Originally posted by: finite automaton
I thought MOM alerts were for exchange related issues.. how does a playstation have anything to do with exchange?

MOM can monitor ANYTHING on the wire. we are lucky the other admin i work with is a scripting wiz and has made all sorts of nifty alerts.

we use it to monitor the network, sql servers, specific apps that have to be running 24/7 just about every critical process we have is monitored by MOM including exchange.

Lucky you... the MOM console where I work gives about 95% false positives, and I don't have access to fix it

 

[Ns1]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

That's pretty wack if you can't hook up XBL in a dorm.

 

[Mungla]

We have about 400 users on our network with 3 independent ISPs, one in Texas and two in Oklahoma. Our Internet pipes are fairly small (3Mb to 6Mb) but we have absolutely no problem with them bogging down. We, in IT/OPS, are actually responsible for most of the data going across our ISP (Cashletters can be gigabits in size and we receive & send several a day). Depending on the office location, our MPLS routes their internet traffic to the ISP in that geographic region. The only sort of filtering we have in place is Websense and I have it set to simply filter www and certain protocols. Our users, however, are too scared to download anything if Websense does let them through. Using a proxy or attempting to defeat our filtering is instant termination, no questions asked. They fired a girl not too long ago for deleting an Excel file (they wanted to fire her anyways). Little did they know that I could restore it using Asigra in like 2 minutes. Don't go work for a bank if you want to surf Anandtech!

 

[RESmonkey]

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

That's pretty wack if you can't hook up XBL in a dorm.

How many kids bring consoles to their dorms?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: RESmonkey

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

That's pretty wack if you can't hook up XBL in a dorm.

How many kids bring consoles to their dorms?

I would say most. They think the uni network is theirs to do with as they please just like mommy and daddy's home.

 

[rockyct]

Originally posted by: RESmonkey

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

That's pretty wack if you can't hook up XBL in a dorm.

How many kids bring consoles to their dorms?

A lot. When I was in the dorms, the majority of the guys rooms had at least one game console in them because if there are two or more guys per a room, at least one of them will have a game console. Resnet had no problem with them on the network either. I believe you did have to call them up and say, "I want to hook up my Xbox/PS2 to the network" and they would let it on.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: RESmonkey

Originally posted by: Ns1

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Heh, back when I worked an offsite help desk, I got a call from one of our client sites (Higher Ed, call was from a college student in the dorms - about 6pm) asking for help on getting his XBox connected to the network. He apparently called Microsoft for help first, and the issue was that he was being port blocked, so he called us wanting us to open up the ports on the network. I told him that there was no way for me to get him up and running because I had no ability to open up the ports, and only network services could do that. And I also noted that an XBox is unauthorized hardware on the network anyway, so network would likely laugh at him. After about a 10 second pause of silent, he says, "So.. can you have the network people open up those ports for me?"

I laughed, and forwarded the ticket to network services, and posted also posted it on the wall of shame for everyone to see.

That's pretty wack if you can't hook up XBL in a dorm.

How many kids bring consoles to their dorms?

I would say most. They think the uni network is theirs to do with as they please just like mommy and daddy's home.

They're living there, I don't think it's unreasonable. Gaming doesn't take a whole lot of bandwidth.