Kerio StaR: Does the Internet seem slow today?
If you're a network administrator, probably you've heard this question at some point in your career, if not every other day. With so much multimedia and content available on the web today, it's really easy for a user to tie up your network. Recently on our network here in San Jose we had to lay down some rules, the hard way.
The StaR feature of WinRoute, or (Statistics and Reporting) is a great tool to help you understand exactly how people are using the Internet. It uses a database to store everyone's Internet usage, and makes this information available to admins through a web interface. The information is reported in an organized way, like 'web sites visited', 'remote access', 'large file transfers', 'messaging', or 'multimedia'.
We check our StaR reports regularly, but recently we found a few users who were using a lion's share of the bandwidth. By looking into the 'large file transfers' section we tracked down the source. These users were streaming music from their home media library using simplifymedia. Although we didn't want to discourage people from listening to their music at work, we had to create some rules to preserve bandwidth for everyone else.
As a result, we set a daily download quota of 500 MB, and anyone who hits this amount is reduced to a 50 KBps bandwidth limit. This has helped to free up much needed bandwidth, especially now that users know of the policy, they are much more reluctant to use this type of media in the office.
On March 24th at 10:00 AM Pacific time, I'll be presenting the StaR feature so you can see the interface and better understand how it works.
