Client Management Suite

I would like to setup bandwidth throttling on my Altiris 7.1 clients ONLY when they are contacting the server through the WAN.  We have hundreds of remote sites with their own package servers.  Bandwidth consumption is definately an issue as most of the sites have from 384k to a full T1 connection speed.

I was going to setup the agent to "Only throttle when bandwidth is below 1581 KB/s" which is typical for a T1 connection speed.  Is this the correct way to set this up?

The bandwidth testing mechanism is not an exact science...so you're probably better to err on the side of caution and set it a bit higher.  The test is actually between the client agent and the server it is downloading from, not the client and the NS.  So, if you have a local PS on-site with a 100MBit connection, the client will test bandwidth and get a nice high number (of course not 100MB exactly, but probably on the order of 700KB/s).  If the PS goes down and the client "fails over" to a PS back at the main office, then the bandwidth test will return a lower number (say on your T1 it might get a result of only 500KB/s, if the line is actively in use already).  

In general, throttling by % is a pretty safe bet...and does it really matter if it takes a local LAN client a little longer to download a package?  We always set our agents to download before executing anything since we don't like to risk a failed install due to network drop, etc (especially with laptop users on wireless).

If you have all package on PS the bandwidth by endpoint should be negligeable.

However if you go and setup throttling you probably want to use some values like 400Kbps, which is fast enough to make use of available bandwidth whilst limiting the chances to fill the pipe with requests from a single computer.

Alos beware that T1 speed 1,581 Kbits per seconds, which is shy of 200KBytes per second.

The interface does not specify bits or bytes per second.  It has KB/s but is that Kilobits/s or Kilobytes/s?

Capital B denote Bytes, while lower b indicates bits.

This is the convention, to keep it clear between the 2 (given ther'e a factor of 8 difference). Most apps will talk about Bytes per seconds (K or M) whilst network interfaces talk about bits.

I was never quite sure about that.  Makes it much easier to remember.

How would you set this up?  What % do you use?