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Vista's 'Next Gen' TCP/IP Stack
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.'"
...let me choose how much bandwidth to allocate to each app, and their relative priority? I want my browser to go first, then Google talk, then any updates (OS, virus checker, firewall) and finally P2P. It's quite annoying that I can't do that on XP. Perhaps it's a tricky problem though.
Rather interesting that the quote in the summary here on slashdot skipped this (emphasis mine):
... it really doesn't do much. It may be slightly more convenient to configure QoS on your routers based on the tags rather than port numbers ... but that's about it.
FTFA: "Vista's ability to use centrally configured group-policies to push out policies to specific users or servers, and allows tagging of packets with the Diffserv code point values, so that our network infrastructure can see the marking and react to it in different ways - whether it's VoIP traffic, or TCP/IP business critical traffic, or web-surfing traffic. (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.)"
So
- Roach
Bandwidth management _must_ not rely on the host's cooperation. All will work beautifully until a virus totally rapes the network because QoS responsibility had been shifted from the network to the hosts. Damn, this isn't just stupid, it's freaking pathetic. What next Microsoft, pull in layer 2 into your stack as well?
I have noticed this in a lot of Windows apps as well and it dumbfounds me that, after all these years, Microsoft programmers still haven't got threaded programming into their heads.
I mean, why does Access requesting data from a network database freeze up the entire machine (or at least the whole TCP/IP stack)? And nothing frustrates me more than Outlook. When you're typing an email message and Outlook "requests data from server" in the background, freezes your input into the current window. Damn, guys.. do that crap in a background thread and stop interrupting the UI for something not related to what I'm doing at the moment.
The other thing that kills me is the fact that the window is a part of the application and not a part of the desktop. I mean, when something freezes, you can't easily iconize, resize, or do pretty much anything with the window the app is contained in. IMHO, the UNIX window environments did that right - the window is owned by the window manager and tells the application how big it should be or if it got resized, not the other way around.
I use Linux at home, but have to use Windows in the corporate world (and yes, we're sprinting like mad towards a Vista roll-out on 40,000 some odd desktops in '07). I haven't heard if Vista fixes any of my pet peeves, but I'm hoping, at least as far as sanity at work goes, that it does.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Exactly. And if using Group Policy you can easily set it to give say sap.exe high priority and iexplore.exe and firefox.exe low priority (if that would be right for your business). That way, if sap.exe uses port 80 as well you aren't artificially restricting it at the router/switch.
Microsoft astroturf in action.
the value in this will be that you can push it through group policy and mass configure workstations. It will be just another policy that will help keep your workstations from running away and flooding your network.