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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.'"
"redesigned from the ground up"
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...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.
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
Because Linux doesn't have the super marketing powers.
OK - it is nice, but it certainly is not new.
Of course, I'm getting it for DirectX 10 games, but that's just me
Just you? Wow, those will be some disappointing sales figures.
If that guy in accounting is spending all his time downloading movies off from bittorent, wouldn't it be better to fire him instead of shaping his packets??
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Up until now, there have been a grand total of ZERO reasons for me to be interested in Vista. None of the new features hold any draw for me. It's good to see that there's finally something worthwhile in it--traffic shaping at the machine level is a good thing.
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GRC | Security Now! Transcript of Episode #51 "Vista's Virgin Stack" http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-051.htm
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Big deal. ______ has had this in the kernel since ______.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
traffic shaping still isn't a breeze to setup under linux and keep in mind in many windows-centric environments, people just don't have the linux experience.
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.
Yeah, right...because if history teaches us anything, its that Linux is easier to use then Windows.
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?
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.
The network has different characteristics depending upon what point you are at on it.
... and then put a shaping router on the WAN links.
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
Many people on Slashdot have been screaming for over a year that Vista doesn't offer anything new, nothing worth upgrading for, etc. Well, it seems to me it does. I think anyone who is intellectually honest would agree... I might be on the wrong site?
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.
Well, it's expensive. Are you going to waste a box that can run Vista on that? A box that can run shorewall and traffic shaping is a P100 with 64MB RAM, which can be found for free.
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.
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. :-)
It's obvious that no one has RTFA....
"(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.
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.
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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.
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".
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The bandwidth throttling may not be a big deal to you, but on high bandwidth high latency links you can get huge performance improvements (i.e. 10-100x) with proper use of TCP window scaling. In the original TCP spec the window size could be no more than 64 KB, but this behavior was later amended and a TCP option was added to allow you to increase this value.
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.
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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.
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