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NetEqualizer October Newsletter: Contest, Tips, New Platforms In the October Edition:
1) Contest Continues, New Question
2) New Release
3) Coming Soon: New Platforms
4) Keeping up with our CEO
5) INSIDER TIPS
THANKSGIVING FLY AWAY Contest LAST CHANCE
Win two round trip tickets for US domestic air travel. Last month we asked: Would you like to see the NetEqualizer feature set
bundled in with a commercial access point. Thanks to all of you who wrote in. This month's question for contest entry is: Do you bond more than one network interface together from your service provider? If so what type of device do you use and what is the approximate cost? Send your answers to admin@apconnections.net, put “Contest” in the subject line and you’ll be entered to win.
The contest deadline is 5pm MST, Friday, November 3, so the winner can go “home” for Thanksgiving.
NEW RELEASE Just a reminder that our new release is out in General availability. We are now shipping the official version with MAC shaping/redirection. New Features in this release: MAC shaping by name
-allows you to select a MAC address and set a rate cap. Mac addresses may also be labeled with customer names for human readability MAC redirection
- allows you to re-direct unauthorized users to a web site of your choosing
COMING SOON: NEW PLATFORMS 1) We are currently working on a new class of servers that will expand our CPU power and allow our customers to track more users with room to spare. These new offerings will handle up to 10,000 or more. We are currently expanding our test lab utilities to simulate these harsher loads. 2) We have heard your concerns about the fan noise on the current 1u rack servers. The flight deck ear muffs that we ship with the units came in different colors but for some reason they did not catch on. In all seriousness, the nature of 1u rackmount servers is that they require a class of fans that just make considerable noise. We checked other popular products in this form and all are expected to be locked away in a computer room. As an alternative we will begin to offer a 2u desktop model comparable in quality and power to the current 1u with a quieter fan option for office duty.
Keeping in step with the CEO This month Art will be heading to the OBCAI conference: Office Business Center Association International’s International Conference. He’ll be speaking to business center owners about how the NetEqualizer can give them more bandwidth bang for their buck. This year the conference will be held in Las Vegas, but there’s no gamble with the NetEqualizer. If you’re interested in getting in on the action, check out: http://obcai.crabnet.com/meeting06/index.cfm?page=home. Art will be getting on a plane again to head to Dallas where he will meet with the regional sales managers for CompUSA. Once they know how many verticals the NetEqualizer serves, they’ll be able to offer this superior bandwidth management tool to a larger segment of their vast customer base.
INSIDER TIPS FOR THE POWER USER Tip 1 A customer has a 30M Internet. During normal hours the bandwidth should be allocated to local college resources, after hours home users (adsl, cable) should be sharing the full bandwidth. The solution was to set up a cron job that would apply
different configurations by time of day. # The format of cron fields are:
# Min hour dayofmonth month dayofweek program
# example to overwrite the NetEqualizer config with another one at 3:00AM
# and then revert again at 6:00 AM
0 3 * * * /art/do3am.sh
0 6 * * * /art/do6am.sh
The commands in the user created files do3am.sh and do6am.sh should be executable and contain commandline commands to do the copying and then restarting of the neteq process. Those of you that want to try this out can contact support@netequalizer.com to get help with creating the multiple configs and user commands. It is possible to do this all from the web GUI but you can do it from the console or SSH access more easily. Tip 2 Note: this tip is courtesy of Ed Loebach and Nathan Lloyd, network administrators at St Mary's University of Minnesota http://www.smumn.edu. They had the unusual case (NOT) of their peer-to-peer users filling up their connection table, even with global connections in place. When the connection table filled up at peak times with 5000 entries they lost their Equalizing for short periods. (The Netequalizer cannot track the usage of users unless they are in the connection table). They decided to try reducing the parameter "INACTIVE_TICS" to 400. This had the effect of timing out connection in the active connection table in 4 seconds instead of the default 10. Early reports from Ed and Nathan are that this little change increased turn-over in the connection table, i.e., old unused connections left the table more quickly, and hence the more active p2p connections could be tracked more efficiently without the table overflowing. There seems to be no ill side effects.
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Network Optimization News Magazine
We are proud of our new sponsorship for the on-line Magazine www.networkoptimizationnews.com Please check out their site when you get a chance. It is chock full of interesting content and industry briefs.
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For information about APconnections' family of products and software updates - visit our website at: www.netequalizer.com or contact our support staff at: support@APconnections.net
©2006 APconnections, Inc. All rights reserved. APconnections, NetEqualizer and AirEqualizer are trademarks of APconnections, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. ... |
