Vista's 'Next Gen' TCP/IP Stack 259
boyko.at.netqos writes "Microsoft's new Vista TCP/IP stack might be beneficial to businesses looking to increase use of their IT infrastructure... if they did it right. Ted Romer at Network Performance Daily writes: '[Vista] now allows us to throttle outbound traffic at a client or server. For example, you can throttle the bandwidth of a particular subnet to a particular server, giving some departments more access to the servers that they need. You can even restrict outgoing bandwidth for certain peer-to-peer applications like bit torrent. This shaping can also be handy when applied to servers, allowing less bandwidth for certain users/departments, and more for others. While consumers may debate whether Vista is a worthwhile upgrade, I believe it to be important for enterprise customers who will best be able to put Vista's capabilities to their fullest potential. Of course, I'm getting it for DirectX 10 games, but that's just me.'"
Re:Will it... (Score:5, Informative)
And, probably, other systems. I'm just most familiar with OpenBSD's filtering.
Interesting discussion of this at SecurityNow (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this a slashvertisment ? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there probably will be. My coworkers on XP spend surprising amounts of time staring at the screen waiting for the machine to allow user input again - inproving this WILL improve productivity by a few minutes a day. The ones that do not suffer this have dual processor systems.
That said - moving to *nix the gnome desktop with remote appications open can suck intensely if the network is busy - one window that is slow to refresh can lock the screen up for minutes which should never happen under X windows.
Window Scaling and ECN! (Score:3, Informative)
For anyone interested in enabling Compound TCP (Score:5, Informative)
The Compound TCP talked about in TFA is disabled in Vista by default. If you want to turn it on, you can open a console with admin privs (right click Command Prompt -> Run as Administrator) and enter:
This was one of the first commands I ran after Vista installed, and the difference is noticable.
Re:Will it... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure if you can specify individual priority levels, but the OS already allows applications to download using the lowest priority.
Re:Wondershaper (Score:5, Informative)
You have two options:
1. The Vista box shapes traffic for itself and nothing else. This isn't terribly effective as to have a good effect you need to shape all of the traffic, giving different hosts different priority.
2. You have the Vista box as a firewall for the network. In this case it's expensive, can be broken into, and if it is, you have a major mess because all your traffic will be going through it.
An old P100 with 64MB RAM running shorewall is practically invulnerable. No ports need to be open, excepting for SSH from the internal network, or not even that. You can run it from CompactFlash and have it with no moving parts at all. It'll quietly sit there for years shoveling packets back and forth with zero problems. It doesn't accept connections, it has no open ports of public services -- it's impossible to break into barring a kernel bug in the TCP stack.
Re:Wondershaper (Score:5, Informative)
"(Granted, this QoS doesn't guarantee anything, it just marks the packet in Windows and it is up to your network infrastructure to honor those tags.) "
Vista supports Diffserv tagging based on the user/application/whatever, enforced via group policy. It's up to your network hardware to actually do the shaping.
Re:Quoted portion leaves out important bit (Score:5, Informative)
And now that I've actually had some coffee
They're breaking rule #1: Never trust the client.
If your QoS network equipment is using these tags instead of actual port numbers, well, it's pretty easy to reconfigure how a client tags its packets.
- Roach
Re:Netlimiter (Score:3, Informative)
Re:-1 Linux Zealot (well... in slashdot might be + (Score:2, Informative)
Someone interested in SELLING you a dancemat has done the work for you in the WinDOS environment.
Networking, OTOH, is not that sort of thing. It's been well supported in Linux before there was any TCP/IP libraries even included in Windows.