On the impossible dream that is Infomation Security in a University.
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More traffic graphs. This one shows the streaming effect from yesterday’s match. Black is overall traffic, purple is streaming media (nearly all flash for the match period).
Remember that our link capacity is 1Gb. We’ll be putting some shaping in place for the next match :)
Spot when the England world cup match was. The solid curve is data coming into the University and that peak between 3pm and 5pm means we maxed out our connection to the internet for the duration of the match.
As part of a project on bandwidth management, I’ve been generating some statistics on how busy the University’s link to the outside world is, and where all that bandwidth is going. We’ve got a 1 gig link into JANET and it’s rather busy, so we’ve looking at bandwidth shaping tools.
Some raw numbers first:
So, what’s that traffic made of?
Here black is the overall, purple is streaming protocols and green is “standard” protocols (including http, email etc). A lot of people are watching a lot of videos and/or playing flash games.
(BTW If you’re wondering how academics ever get to do any work, most of that video is actually going to the student study bedroom network rather than the main campus network)
Now lets look at what the streaming protocols are:
Red is the overall, green is flash streaming and the light brown is ppstream. So we can see that the single biggest protocol we have is flash.
How much data is this? Well, in a 16 hour period since we turned on accounting, we’ve pulled a 1.1Tb of flash. That’s a lot of video.
One final graph: gaming. This is an interesting on: the max volume isn’t that high (~100mpbs) but a) it’s peaky and b) it’s nearly all Steam, which isn’t what I expected at all.
Green is stream. The red is the graph for all gaming protocols, which overlaps the Stream line so closely you can’t separate them most of the time.
You may be surprised to see no peer-to-peer traffic in these stats. That’s because we block it on the grounds that 99% of the content is copyright material used without permission. Also, when the p2p block isn’t in place, the link utilisation hits 100%, which obviously impacts on people doing real work
Food for thought. There’ll probably be a sequel to this shortly since this is what I’m going to be working on for the next week or two.
