the internet is slow today...

my 3614 was purring along smoothly, i was tasked with making it work nice with our nortel contivity firewall, and a web filter called bess...  bess was a dog, a real dog for the filter company owner...  bess was loyal, faithful and true and she didn't allow our users to go to unsavory sites any longer... of course her filtering caused processing overhead... and the contivity (a great firewall, but i didn't like the fruit inspired filtering icons) also took its toll on performance... toss in dns, dhcp and possibly a packet filter...  "geez the internet seems slow today"...  "seems fine to me"...  "it was faster yesterday"... the empirical evidence was overwhelming and always based on feelings... "it just feels slow is all"... "can you ping?"...  "yes, but what is that REALLY telling me?"... in a word, EVERYTHING...

packet internet groper has a way of restoring your sanity by way of proving network connectivty... but feelings are more reliable as far as management is concerned...  "the internet just doesn't seem right to day"...  here's a picture; try squeezing a ton of users through a garden hose at the same time... what do you get? an embittered user community and a busy help desk phone...  there was this thing once called a cache engine... stick it in the router and it will save url's for visited websites on our side of the fire wall and distribute them from inside the network...  nice idea...  didn't work very well..

what does work?  more frigging bandwidth... you've got 100 M behind the firewall  for hosts, now let's shove them through a five meg pipe to the isp...

how do you feel about your network today?