bandwidth limiting

greetings,

what is the best method to go about creating bandwidth limitations? we have a t1 here, and there are approx 20 office computers and approx 40 'other' workstations.

the 'other' workstations are not at all high priority, but, more often than not, these 'other' workstations are the ones that are utilizing the entire t1 while the 20 office computers struggle to get a connection.

the core L3 switch on the network isnt a cisco, its a netgear (gsm7312).

but the L2 switch that all of the 'other' workstations are on is a cisco catalyst 3500xl.

off the top of my head, i was thinking to limit the outgoing port from the GSM to the Cisco as 1 Mbps, but that would still give all of the 'other' workstations 125 kBps (right?), which is by far the majority of the available t1.

any ideas at all would be very appreciated

it would be better to use some QoS to differentiate your traffic before throttling it, i.e. you don't need to limit everything to 1Mbps so you don't punish LAN traffic aswell. Ideally you'd rate limit internet traffic on the egress port on your L2 switch to the core, that keeps all the unnecessary traffic which will be dropped anyway out of the core. If you rate limit on the PCs uplink you would not be able to share unused bandwidth.

i see what you are saying (i think)

oddly enough in my situation, there would never be any large files that would need to be moved from the L2 switch with the 40 'other' workstations to the core switches or the rest of the network. all of the traffic would be basically just web browsing. so i wouldnt mind locking the trunk going to the L2 switch to <1Mbit, but even then, it wouldnt really 'solve' ,my problem as they could still achieve 125kBp/s

now when you say 'rate limit internet traffic on the egress port on the L2 switch', is that possible to do on a Catalyst 3500XL? when you say 'internet traffic' it makes me think of like, http or ftp, but i dont believe that the Catalyst 3500XL is capable of knowing what protocol the packets are that it is passing

sorry if this question seems awkward, im not at all well versed on QoS/CoS