OT Dropbox sucking up internet bandwidth?

We have an external company takes care of our IT. Things have been slow sometimes lately and the IT guys asked if anyone had dropbox, which I do. They said that was a large part of the problem. I'm pretty much clueless when it comes to IT, but I found in my dropbox setting under security a list of devices linked to dropbox. The only one was our server. I unlinked it. Could that have been the problem? Or do I need to do something else?

Thanks, George H.

Reply to
George Herold
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You have my sympathy.

Put it back.

No.

You need to set Dropbox to use LAN sync instead of doing everything over the internet. The problem is the Dropbox often erroneously detects internal and departmental firewalls. If this happens, it switches to sending everything over the WAN (internet). Similarly, LAN sync fails if your server is on a different IP subnet. In the past, Dropbox would continue to use the internet for sync, until the connectivity problem was solved. However, I think they fixed that a few years ago.

Dropbox is quite efficient at sending updates to documents, where it sends only the changes. It works with any file type: So, if there's too much Dropbox sync traffic, it's probably caused by new files, not changes to old files.

A great way to generate tons of traffic is to enable versioning. This keeps old copies of your documents and creates new copies when something is changed. Dropbox is again smart about only sending changes, but sometimes interprets the OS name changes as the creation of a new document and proceeds to send both the old versions and the current version. The good news is that versioning was removed in Word

2013. Note that this is in addition to old versions that Dropbox archives: However, if you're a Dropbox Pro user, you get to keep 1 years worth of old junk, errr... documents: You won't see these in your Dropbox sync folders, but they're available for download if necessary.

About the only way that IT is going to identify the culprit and reduce traffic is to setup monitoring and watch what is moving on the network. Programs like MRTG, RRDTOOL, Nagios, PRTG, etc can do it using SNMP data from computahs, switches and routers. I used to do quite a bit of that. You can also set up some kind of traffic monitoring on your own desktop to prove your innocence.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

George:

Since I have had my own FTP servers (since they were invented :-), I never saw any need for services like DropBox. The first time I used it was when a friend send me some ISO images of software that his company had purchased and mine could not afford. Only then I realized the need for such kind of service.

[I hope the copyright police is not out there]

Later on, I became fascinated by audio processing: Noise Reduction, Voice Recognition, Speaker Verification, determining whether a call was long distance ... :-). You definitely need some sort of service to host those humongous WAV files. Musicians are big users, as well.

A couple weeks ago, I discovered Google Drive, and was pleasantly surprised, so I am migrating from DropBox to Google Drive. It is really good: almost like a real website, for free.

I only have 2 complaints with the latter service:

- I don't think there is a way to do the equivalent of "cd .." (going to the parent directory). If you have a deep hierarchy (filesystem) this can be rather annoying.

- I keep on logging in and out to verify what my users see, to acquire different "personalities". Not the end of the world.

Back to your problem: There are many network analyzers (some for free) that can measure the traffic, discriminated by user.

Oh, if you are NOT actively uploading or downloading files during the network slowdown, you are definitely NOT the culprit.

Regards,

-Ramon

=================================

Reply to
Ramon F Herrera

Well previously we had an employee doing it, turns out he knew only a little more than me... but talked a good game.

Can't. No more options.

Wow, thanks for the long reply. I've made no changes to things and ~1/2 the drop box stuff is just posting pictures/ text to places like SED. It was a week ago that I put up anything and my entire drop box collection is only 100MB.

It's weird all the help screens tell me to start by clicking on the dropbox icon in my system tray.. but I don't have any dropbox icon. (I first started using dropbox on a different computer... perhaps I have to install it on this computer???)

Anyway the most I could find is a dropbox folder in my documents folder. (Which appears to hold all the stuff I've put there.)

Jeff, thanks for your help, but I suffer a big guilt trip when you post a long answer. So I'm just going to punt and let the IT guys worry about it.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Yeah not uploading or down loading anything in a week or more. Anyway thanks for your response I'll look at google drive. (Though google is becoming the new microsoft, if you know what I mean.)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

IT people are fairly easy to find. The problem is that they tend to build IT empires, which can become top heavy and expensive. They also tend to be the first to get laid off or fired when budgets get tight. One of my numerous job descriptions is an IT "hired gun", who is usually hired to do damage control after the IT staff fails.

Another problem is that outsourced IT can usually do the easy stuff, but not the difficult or tricky. You don't need IT or a help desk for the easy stuff. You need it for the messy stuff, such as network monitoring and troubleshooting.

This mornings fun example... Customer calls me announcing that she can't print from her network connected printer. I login with Teamviewer and find the printer disconnected and not visible with: arp -a and other utilities. She had been gone on vacation which suggests that other people had been borrowing her equipment. Their IT person had just blown 2 hrs on the phone with no results. I had her trace back the ethernet wiring and found that nothing was plugged into the printer, while both ends of the ethernet cable were plugged into the nearby ethernet switch. Despite the obvious wiring problem and simple solution, the customer failed to fix it because she left her glasses in Europe and couldn't see anything. I finally had her kidnap some random employee to plug the printer back in. It worked.

Like I said. Good luck with outsourced IT.

You should be able to sync to the local server. However, if all you're doing is syncing to a folder somewhere on a web server for S.E.D. files, you can probably live without syncing to the local server.

Sorry but I didn't have time to make it shorter. I like to write my replies in the same way I prefer to read answers to my questions and discussions. I like detail, examples, explanations, URL's, and buzzwords I can research. Terse one-line replies are a waste of effort. Better a long detailed reply, than a large number of brief pontifications and assertions.

By todays standards, that's not much data. Unless you're updating some of the contents constantly, which is what happens when you put log files in the Dropbox folder, I don't see you generating much traffic. However, if you want to be sure, ask IT if you could install a traffic monitor and make some pretty graphs of your network traffic.

This is free for 30 days, which should be sufficient to determine if your machine is generating too much traffic. It has a "rate recorder' [F5] which should be suitable for producing the necessary evidence.

I don't know how you have it configured on your computer. In general, if you're syncing a folder on your machine, you MUST have the icon in the system tray. One possible culprit is that you are hiding icons in the system tray. Assuming Windoze 7 or 8, do this an they should all magically appear.

You can also see if Dropbox checking the Task Manager: Under the "Processes" tab, you should see Dropbox in there somewhere. I'm not 100.0% sure it's called "Dropbox" as I don't have it installed on this machine.

Well, see if it's working. Put a small file in there and see if it syncs. If yes, then Dropbox is running on your machine.

Not a problem. I like detail and I prefer detailed answers. Like I've said twice, good luck with IT.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

So are janitors, and I'm not sure which is the better option for keeping any given network running smoothly.

To borrow a thought from Nicholas Taleb, I would probably opt for the janitor. The network still wouldn't work right, but at least you wouldn't expect it to.

Reply to
mpm

I would be out of business if networks ran smoothly. Back in the dark ages of computing, business owners would ask me to install this or that feature or gizmo on their networks. (I've never done an internet connected coffee pot, but I've come close). A "simple network" is an oxymoron. All the fancy services, goodies, constant upgrades, etc are not the best for reliability, which is what the business owner usually begs me to provide after all the features he previously requested prove useless or problematic. Getting paid to install stuff, and then remove it later, really helps support my decadent and lavish lifestyle.

I once had a theory that if I publicized a problem that I was working on, literally everyone in a company would eventually volunteer a solution, suggestion, or approach. So, I tried it and was very surprised to find a few people in odd positions that had quite a bit of computer and networking experience. It wasn't the janitor, but one of the box shufflers in shipping that offered the best ideas. When I asked why he was working in shipping instead of IT, he mentioned that IT people tend to have long hours, which would detract from his surfing hours.

Anyway, my experiment in soliciting company wide advice demonstrated that people tend to offer solutions in their areas of expertise. When I asked the office help how I should approach the problem, they suggested better documentation to help me find what had changed to cause the problem. When I asked facilities, they suggested that the problem was probably in the wiring hidden inside the walls which could use rebuilding. When I asked engineering, they were more than willing to redesign every likely system component. I didn't ask the janitor, but I could imagine he would suggest that I should clean up the messy server closet. Oddly, upper management did not suggest organizing a committee to look at the problem, but instead suggested we go back to whatever we did before they bought the expensive network. I didn't ask IT because I was the "rent an IT person".

We return you now to whatever it was we should be doing...

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Dropbox sends only changes to files when they are updated and synchronized. FTP and rsync sends the entire file. Sending diffs is much faster and less bandwidth intensive than sending the entire file every time something changes. Dropbox also keeps archival changes (i.e. diffs) so that you can recover from mistakes.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Regarding rsync, you couldn't be more wrong. It uses a distributed differencing algorithm to send differences only. It was never sued for using a previously patented algorithm (by Travelling Software of LapLink fame) but we avoided the issue by reversing the client and server ends to produce a more more web-efficient version, that is patented in my name. Not the most important of my three patents, but still significant.

Clifford Heath

Reply to
Clifford Heath

I stand corrected and my apologies. I seem to be behind the times. I don't recall seeing this feature when using rsync on SCO Unix and Xenix, and wrongly assumed this to still be the case. I vaguely recall that rsync was not included in the OSR5 distribution because of legal issues, but could be user compiled and installed. At the time, for backup, I used various "super-tar" type programs.

As I read the Wikipedia page, rsync originated in 1996. Did rsync have differential backup included since the beginning, or was it added later? I don't recall.

Looks like Dropbox uses librsync, which seems to avoid the software patent issues.

Drivel: My involvement as an SCO Unix reseller mostly ended in about

1999 and essentially died in 2001 with the Caldera purchase. You'll find a rather large number of my postings in comp.unix.sco.misc. I also contributed to the Xenix FAQ:
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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Any link to your work or patent? We might have to talk. We are working on Remote Cloud Storage.

Furthermore, we want to outfit some laptops with 1G Ethernet, older generat ions are too slow. The top of this picture is a PCIe 1G half size. The la ptop has room for full size, but not over-sized height. So, first thing is to change the header to right angle, perhaps smaller pitch. The bottom pa rt is the laptop connector board. I believe it's all passive wires.

We need a new custom board with header to the PCIe, dropping the VGA port i f necessary. Any recommendation for someone who can do it?

formatting link

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

Just open another window in "privacy mode" - there's no need to log out.

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umop apisdn
Reply to
Jasen Betts

It could be that you were just unaware of how it was working. Cunning stuff indeed!

Interesting - I didn't know that anyone else was aware of the patent violation.

I believe so. Andrew Tridgell thought they had invented it, not knowing it was already patented, and rsync became popular before we pointed it out, after contacting TSI to try to license the patent. TSI also seemed unaware that rsync was in violation, and didn't seem to want to pursue it. Nevertheless, it prevented us from a commercial application, which is why we patented a better way to do a similar thing (and then actually deployed a still better way, which is not patented).

rsync still lacks a number of features that would be a massive "easy win" for reducing communications bandwidth, but the maintainers don't seem to be interested. Eventually I'll do something about it myself.

The Traveling Software patent expired some years ago.

Clifford Heath

Reply to
Clifford Heath

That's correct. As I recall, I just grabbed the source, compiled it for whatever platform I needed, and used it on the assumption that there were no legal complications. Much later, SCO distributed a CD full of open source and freeware as "Skunkware". As I recall, my use of rsync for backup did not involve running differential backups because the target media was always empty. There were a few systems that used rsync (and some scripts) for maintaining a live backup of a server in another building. That may have used differential backups but since I didn't set it up, I didn't notice if it was being used. Sorry to be so vague but it's been a LONG time since those days.

I didn't know about any patent violation. The problem was that SCO insisted that all software included in the distribution include a license by the authors to allow SCO to use it for commercial purposes. That meant a large number of contracts and plenty of emotion filled negotiations. I was not a party to all this, but I did get to both watch and negotiate in the legal wrangling. If you have an OSR5 system available, run the "copyrights" command and look at the long list of names. Many software authors treated all this as a religious offense to the cause of open source software and refused to cooperate. A few even removed SCO products from their make files. Unfortunately, the person in charge of the developers program died earlier this year, so I can't ask him if he recalls any details.

I don't recall (or want to revisit) whether rsync allowed SCO to distribute its software in OSR5. I do know that it had to be independently built and was included on the Skunkware CD, which implies that something went wrong in the licensing process.

Before the days of Arcnet, Starlan, Ethernet, and similar networks, Traveling Software (Laplink) products were used to move data around via the serial and parallel ports. They were more than happy to license their technology to large companies that included it in their PC product packages. However, I suspect that they would have considered rsync to be a direct competitor to their Laplink software which might explain why they didn't want to license it.

If you're going to produce a commercial product, it's considered a good idea to own the technology.

Oh-oh. I see a fork in the code coming. "Easy wins" and "quick fixes" never seem to be quite so easy or quick. Yesterday, I turned a

30 minute service call into an all day nightmare.

590 hits for "Traveling Software" including citations.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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So, just because of your ego, not only do you admit to being a 
criminal publicly, you also rat out your "friend" as being an 
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Reply to
John Fields

Please don't do that. I've had to deal with transport schemes that do that solely to bypass the Unix process priority system to give them a performance boost. They would build their drive into the kernel as a kernel module (device driver), assign an absurdly low nice number (-20) to their controlling program, and basically take over the machine. Backups would run blindingly fast, while everything else times out or runs at the speed of a snail.

Take a look at Fiber Channel cards and systems. The 8/16 Gbit/sec cards are all PCIe and seem to do much of what I would guess you're trying to accomplish including SAN (storage area networks):

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

They would be OK as long as we backup/sync in off-hours. They should not b e doing anything else.

We will try to stick with 1G. All the servers have dual 1G ports (one for oc12) and stations with single 1G port. The problem is with the laptops wi th 0.1G RJ45, but they all have internal PCIe. We just need to somehow bri ng out the PCIe, then 1G network interface. An external PCIe connector wou ld fit nicely in the existing VGA cutout. We might even get rid of the USB s and RJ45 connectors. One PCIe connector is good enough.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

There's a PCIe connector in the back of the expressxard slot (it's a funny shape, but electrically it's PCIe), you can buy expresscard GBE adaptors off the shelf for like $20

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umop apisdn
Reply to
Jasen Betts

e:

ot be doing anything else.

for oc12) and stations with single 1G port. The problem is with the laptop s with 0.1G RJ45, but they all have internal PCIe. We just need to somehow bring out the PCIe, then 1G network interface. An external PCIe connector would fit nicely in the existing VGA cutout. We might even get rid of the USBs and RJ45 connectors. One PCIe connector is good enough.

But need new laptops. The customer have tons of old laptops running XP, si nce their app won't run on anything else. Most of them have two PCIe, with one for WiFi. However, some don't have socket on the board for the second one. In that case, we have to sacrifice WiFi as well. These laptops don' t really leave the desk, but mainly for less space occupied.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

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