Is My IT Dept Accurate of Full of It?

I'm not sure I understand your meaning honestly... what I meant was that if say there are 5 video conferences going, it's similar to 5 people on SL right?

And.. I'll be gone from the forums for a few hours, so don't expect me to reply for a while if you say something towards me based on this =P

Byebye ^^
-Oki

It's a hard life at the "code-face".

http://xkcd.com/303/

This is pretty relevant, anyway, if not exactly the same. It so depends on how much compression they're actually doing on the video signal, but it should be same ballpark, I'd guess. The thing is, though, most WebEx use is text and some (very compressed) static graphics--way less bandwidth than SL, so that will likely be the IT guys' response.

I suspect that the real thing here, though, is that somebody in IT is just dismissing SL because the idea didn't come from the IT department in the first place, and not enough preparatory "stakeholdering" happened at the right levels of management. Otherwise, IT would be seeing this as an opportunity to finally get the bandwidth they wanted all along. So now, instead of being signed on with the secret scheme to let bandwidth go to hell and then use it as an excuse to get fatter pipes, they've decided to put bandwidth up as a roadblock so *you* get to fight the battle for fatter pipes.

This is why you always schmooze your IT guy, or if that's too distasteful to contemplate doing yourself, "delegate" that task to your management.

I am an IT director. If it were my network team raising those roadblocks, I would challenge them to offer me potential solutions on how to solve the problem rather than 'reasons why we can't do it'.

Some potential solutions off the top of my management head:

-Does your network team have QoS enabled on their routers? Could they set SL traffic as lower priority so that mission-critical services are unaffected?

-Could a secondary DSL line be purchased & segregated for Second Life use only, and just charge the cost of that DSL line back to your Second Life project/cost center?


Hope this helps!

qft!

my IT guys are partial to pastry. it is important to know the food preferences of your IT department, and indulge them liberally.

I guess I am spoiled when it comes to available bandwidth at work but even if it were allowed, I'd not want to run SL on it.

Is using something like SLeek viable for those who don't NEED all the bells and whistles?

***edit*** above question was to OP.

If only all IT Directors were like you. Sadly, most of them are Pointy Haired Bosses with no knowledge of IT, so simply take what their more knowledgable underlings say on face value. There are always solutions to get round the problems, but in most large organisations the only people who know what they are, are the people whose jobs will be made harder by having to implement them.

Maybe they know maximum bandwidth is limited and dont want to Lose THEIR access to SL when they have to give up bandwidth to others.

Of course even if the IT guys could make it work flawlessly ..

you'd have to question the management who decided it was a good idea to let their employees play a video game when they should be working.

Bandwidth isn't something you can get around unless the IT director asks for more money for a better connection. Having more bandwidth does make the job of someone in IT harder, you're right. The office dossers download MP3's, porn and illegal videos all day long and place the company at the risk of huge legal liabilities. The IT department of course are the people who get it in the neck when they try and comply with the law.

A valid point. Look at the NHS. They let me play video games all day, and look at then mess it's in now.

I would most definitely rather have you as my IT Director than the one I have. Interesting concept -- "let's see if we can find a solution rather than everyone telling me why it won't work."

My information is that N3 only have an 8Mb connection to the outside. I can only conclude that you are playing "Pong", especially if you are working in the labs (or endoscopy).

/me wonders when The Grid tech will include a corporate proxy/cache. Since intranet bandwidth isn't really (usually.. i think) the issue, why not have one server sitting next to the corporate firewall that caches all the textures and maybe dynamic avatar/object info for your sims.

You'd have latency pain on cache misses but it'd smokin' fast on hits and save tons of internet bandwidth if you tend to keep more than a few people in your corporate sims..


You're welcome but I'm not really an IT hedgie. High-tech? Yes. IT? No.. Travis would be a better one to listen to. QoS was the term he used.

They had a 20mb connection, and I was playing some of those crappy free MMPORGs like Star Sonata etc. I was in payroll

In an effort to placate any hard-working UK tax-payers who may read this, there is also one of these things in the way now (apparently):

http://www.bluecoat.com/

It is to be hoped that this would put paid to any Conan-style shenanigans. It sure as hell screws up out anti-virus updates

I attribute this to their constantly having to deal with computer noobs.

without knowing
1) How much bandwidth is available.
2) How said bandwidth is routed (yes it matters!).
3) What the actual usage in SL is going to be (sticking around one region is less intensive than TPing to 50 malls)

any thing anyone says here is a wild guess....

could they be BS'ing about available bandwidth? sure, wouldn't be a first, there's limits and then there's LIMITS
could they just have a very bad nework design that forces local requests through same routers as remote requests? ayup (common in small biz)
could they be overestimating how much bandwidth SL will suck down per client? of course

could they deprioritize data to/from SL? internally yes, but if it's a small pipe, it won't help much

could they use more efficient design, get more bandwidth, use variaous traffic shaping tools. absolutely, but that's more money talking in most cases and time to set it up.

could they be giving a fairly accurate assement? you betcha

They could be right, if it's anything like my companies internet, It's faster for me to get in the car and drive 3km home to download a big file to a USB stick than watch a loading bar for 30min at work.
Email is capped and sluggish even, I suspect our national company is on a cheap home internet plan.
Funnest thing lately is the IT people had to block seek.com asbeing too popular internets site for staff (seek.com is and Aussie Job search page)

that's telling =)

those sites can be good for morale in companies that pay above the average for jobs in the field they hire in though

When I had a commercial first life presence within SL all adverts needed to be approved by our compliance team, which involved IT having to disable most of their security devices before SL would work on the office network.

I am not a computer boffin, am only repeating what I was told, and would consider it a valid point to opion from a first life commercial viewpoint.

Or they can cause a mass exodus of people thinking, "why am I putting up with this crap for so little?" in our case

The default IT response to any user request is "NO". Then they wait to see if you really need it and will ask again. Seriously, it's true.

I think that's the storemans response. IT one is 'you want it WHEN?!?!?'

I'll agree with the storeman's response - though even if you ask till your blue in the face his answer is NO lol. Our IT manager's standard response 1 is "It's because your computer is crap" lol. seriously thats his response. Unless he is in the presence of the higher ups in which case its standard response 2 - "I'll be there in ten"