Basically, this technology allows you to cap or switch off traffic categorised by packet signatures. We've just implemented two of them at the university I work at, and the moment our network engineer enabled it, you could search on kazaa, but downloads would simply fail to connect. Other P2P services were equally sucessfully blocked.
Of course, there are plenty of HTTP tunnels out there which provide an effective means of bypassing such a system...it will be interesting to see if the P2P networks themselves start to look at encryption layers and such technologies to bypass devices like this one.
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The Packetshaper
Basically, this technology allows you to cap or switch off traffic categorised by packet signatures. We've just implemented two of them at the university I work at, and the moment our network engineer enabled it, you could search on kazaa, but downloads would simply fail to connect. Other P2P services were equally sucessfully blocked.
Of course, there are plenty of HTTP tunnels out there which provide an effective means of bypassing such a system...it will be interesting to see if the P2P networks themselves start to look at encryption layers and such technologies to bypass devices like this one.