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.'"
Is this a slashvertisment ? (Score:5, Insightful)
because it sure reads like one
Microsoft is desperate to get business interested in their Vista product so will trot about all manner of reasons to buy it, but business are not biting, unless this Vista can make workers type faster or calc spreadsheets quicker or email faster than there is NO productivity gains unless wowing the coworker with a 3D AIGLX/Beryl like desktop counts as productive
if an Enterprise is worried about client bandwidth they would already be using a tool dedicated for the job like, say a Router
Re:Wondershaper (Score:3, Insightful)
Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
OK - it is nice, but it certainly is not new.
Re:At least it's now easier to identify Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wondershaper (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you speaking from experience on both fronts? (honest question) Is the vista shaping that difficult?
Linux is great for many things and many people, but sometimes the simpler solution works for a lot of people.
Re:There MS goes again. re-inventing the wheel... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet doesn't have that.
Note also QoS doesn't actually solve all problems. For example, if you have two network applications running, and you want one of them to have priority such that it can take bandwidth from the other when it needs it - well, you're out of luck. QoS doesn't handle that situation.
And don't forget the network as a whole. (Score:5, Insightful)
The WAN routers see the low bandwidth, higher latency serial links and such.
The servers/workstations see the high bandwidth, low latency ethernet links.
Do you really want your server(s) calculating its(their) window(s) based upon whether the request is originating across the WAN or next to it on the LAN?
This sounds like a good idea when you're talking about a single workstation, at home, connected to a cable connection or xDSL or whatever. But it sounds like soooooo many problems in the corporate environment.
Right now it is easy to find the server/workstation that is flooding the network. It's going to be very difficult when you have hundreds(thousands?) of machines that are ALL trying to maximize their bandwidth usage.
Personally, I'd prefer the ability to set the LAN parameters for the machines
reasons to get vista. (Score:3, Insightful)
This article points out 1 cool thing, a new networking stack, but it isn't the only thing. And actually he doesn't even talk about IPv6. For example, my lab at home I has 3 Vista installs, and the communicate out of the box over IPv6. In a couple of years IPv6 will be main-stream because of MS, and we all know the benefits from using the upgraded protocol.
-I think it's cool that when you browse the network people can see a picture of the person instead of the Computer Icon.
-I also do photography, and you use to be able to open an image file on an OSX machine and XP and it would look better on the OSX box. Not with vista.
-For Remote Access: PNRP. Again, really cool... do a search if you don't know what it is.
-Even the average business user will benefit from little things like the snippet tool (prety cool by the way, it's in the accessories folder if you haven't tried it yet).
-I have clients that are going to love the way the Windows clock works now. They can jump around by month, year, or decade in seconds. Those little things are pretty cool.
These are just random features that popped into my head, but it seems that Vista has LOTS of things other than Aero to encourage upgrading on all fronts (Security, tools, toys, looks, games, etc.).
Seriously, apple announces multiple desktops and have this site has a heart attack.... then praises Steve Jobs for being an inventor, a genius, etc. Meanwhile Windows has had those features for years, hell, Unix has for decades!
MS may not have invented the notion of every new feature in Vista, but it's a good product, and way better than XP. A worthy upgrade. It's not one feature that makes it a good product, but the cumulative of many features. I think you anti-ms people lose a lot of credibility when you blindly bash MS and say Vista sucks and it offers no reasons to upgrade for anyone. For all users it has some pretty enticing plusses.
Re:There MS goes again. re-inventing the wheel... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a big deal because now, viruses and malware can slow your network access automagically, so that it'll take weeks for you to download those security patches and antivirus signatures that you should've already downloaded. :-)
Re:Interesting discussion of this at SecurityNow (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the "security expert" that never heard of SYN Cookies before, started the whole mess about raw sockets in XP, and ran (or maybe still runs, haven't checked) a port scanner's supposed to scan the ports of the one going to the website, but can be tricked into scanning somebody else.
Re:Wondershaper (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in Windows-centric environments, many businesses do not and will not use a Windows PC to do things like traffic shaping. Firewalls, routers, etc. of any type are generally going to be dedicated-purpose devices from companies like Cisco, Juniper, CheckPoint, etc., not PCs or other general-purpose computing devices, and usually not even PCs running Linux. Why? Better performance, better security, ease of maintenance, higher reliability, the list goes on.
Re:Wondershaper (Score:5, Insightful)
If "easier to use" means "requires less knowledge", then Linux might not be "easier to use". But if "easier to use" means "consistently behaves the way a knowledgable person expects", then Linux is much "easier to use".
Re:Will it... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can do that - XP has a QoS service that can do exactly what you want. I use it when I'm at work to prioritise my RDP over any torrents downloading, and to make sure my mp3 streams from home don't get choked.
WinTC [vector.co.jp] - a small service used to configure the Windows QoS service.
If that doesn't do it for you, you could download something like NetLimiter, and use that to manage your bandwidth.
You Forgot TCP Window Scaling (Score:4, Insightful)
The optimal window size is (Round Trip Time)*(Bandwidth). For my internet connection (600 KBps) that means that a 64KB window is only adequate for sites whose ping time is no greater than 110 ms. For sites with a higher latency, the amount of bandwidth I can get in a TCP connection between me and this host is artificially limited by my TCP window size.
Right now it generally isn't possible to get a reliable connection after increasing the window size past 64 KB because some older/cheapo routers will not work with TCP windows greater than 64K. But if this gets into Vista and TCP window scaling options started getting heavy use, there would be a lot of pressure on sites with broken routers to get them fixed, and then those of us with high bandwidth connections would reap the benefits.
Re:reasons to get vista. (Score:2, Insightful)
What in the hell are you talking about?
What do you mean, "next-gen"!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this called "next-gen"? There is nothing "next-gen" about this. If anything, Microsoft is finally catching up with the rest of the world in this department.
Such stuff was possible with Linux (and, I'm sure, BSD) servers for years. I know for sure because I used to have such a setup (to do traffic shaping on our -then- relatively slow internet connection shared by too many people) on a Linux server, more than 5 years ago!
Please stop this silly use of marketingspeak of calling something "next-gen" when in fact the company under consideration is just finally catching up with what the rest of the world has been doing for ages.
Re:reasons to get vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that you must be a shill since even a fanboi would not make such an outrageous claim. MS Windows has _never_ had multiple desktops. They released a crappy powertoy for XP that supposedly emulates multiple desktops but the apps never play along nicely since MS Windows was _never_ designed with multiple desktops in mind.
strike
Re:reasons to get vista. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and it looks like you've just proven this point yourself. Thanks for pointing it out yourself, here goes:
Has been available in every other OS I know of for years. Microsoft is finally catching up here.
Whatever. I think it's a privacy-sensitive thing that I'd want to disable ASAP, but ok. So, you can set an arbitrary picture as your login icon. Stop the presses! Groundbreaking developments!
See above, only even more so.
So again, if what you say is true, Microsoft is finally catching up to other OS's here once again. Btw. in fact I don't agree with you, I have used the same 19" CRT on a Mac Mini and a Windows/Linux machine, and the pictures look exactly the same (you just have to calibrate the screen right).
!? Since when has Windows had multiple desktop built into the OS (without installing 3rd party applications, specific video card drivers or funny power tools that nobody ever bothers with - not least because many applications tend to act in very strange ways when you try to use it)? Also, if Vista finally supports this, Microsoft is, once more (how often do you want to point this out?) finally catching up with what has been taken for granted in every other major OS for ages.
So far, my reaction to Vista (and yes, I tried to run RC2 on my AMD64 3500+ with 1GB RAM) is that it's completely underwhelming. The only thing that is overwhelming about it are the memory requirements - it managed to use 600+ MB right from booting it up!
By the way, you also forgot to mention a few more "features", such as the fantastic customer-friendly Digital Restriction Management schemes, activation schemes that might disable your computer, etc. etc. just to name a few.
and the crackers are dancing in the streets (Score:3, Insightful)
This is another fine reason to delay your Vista "upgrade" until at least the second service pack -- assuming you upgrade at all.
I'm taking bets on how many critical patches will be on the ip stack this year (2007).