Google Docs Bandwidth requirements.

[Martin Hughes]

Hi there - my first post, so please forgive me if this has been covered previously. I work with several schools, most of which are now really working well with GApps. One school, however, has a significantly raised monthly data usage and is being pinged heavily by it's ISP. Is it possible that GApps might be causing it?

Thanks

Martin

[Tim Harper]

... it is possible.  Are there any usage reports that you can see like SZ style SINA reports that show traffic?  The sorts of reports that SINA can do will show the sites traffic went to/from and who did it.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Martin Hughes]

Hi Tim

As ever, you're as prompt as you are helpful in your responses:) I saw a quick snapshot - most of the traffic was Windoze updates:/ Something wrong with WSUS I reckon? But Google was up there...... Just wondering if anyone else might have experienced this? My VERY limited tech knowledge makes me believe that much of the GApps traffic is pretty small on a per user basis... would that be correct - esp when compared with a streaming site or Flash (y) site...

Regards

Martin

Martin Hughes

CentreNet ICT PD Cluster Facilitator
Cell phone    021 2228364
Home phone   07 8593214
email martin...@orcon.net.nz

Cluster Calendar http://tiny.cc/kvc92

"There are 3 types of people in the world- those building bridges, those destroying bridges and those waiting to cross bridges"
Yusuf Islam

[bevan.mc...@southlandgirls.school.nz]

YouTube in sporradic usage isn't that big but open up the speed gates and it very quickly grows as supply can meed demand. If you use features such as Offline mode in Chrome for Google Apps it does improve speed and reduce some bandwidth overhead (for mail anyway). Google Drive can however counteract any savings you may expect.
WSUS can be a hungry horse if left to bolt. I've seen businesses heavily stung back in the days where data plans were tight and excess use expensive. Esnure that you've got all unneeded packages/categories turned off if you don't have/need them.

Bevan McNaughton
Intranet Manager
Southland Girls' High School

Sent using my BlackBerry® smartphone powered by Telecom New Zealand

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From: Martin Hughes <martin...@gmail.com>

Sender: techies-f...@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:40:37 +1200

To: <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: techies-f...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Google Docs Bandwidth requirements.

[Martin Hughes]

Hi Bevan

Thanks for that - we're thinking of deploying G drive in a few schools - is it not a good idea when data caps are an issue for a school? Also does anyone have experience of G drive crashing and not working well in schools? Someone told me today it wasn't yet robust enough.....

[Gerard MacManus]

don't use Internet Explorer on XP, most of google apps is now designed for IE on Win7, use firefox or chrome.

Gerard

[Martin Hughes]

Hi Gerard

I don't need any persuading on using Chrome:) And on that - why don't teacher laptops come with Chrome installed??? And a whole host of other useful and free stuff?

[bevan.mc...@southlandgirls.school.nz]

I've used it a bit in and out of our school (home and with other businesses) and had no issues so far PC side. It won't work behind SchoolZone and I've heard mixed reports on Mac so far.
Format depending you might not see all Google Documents in Google Drive and vice versa due to compatibility and sharing issues.
I'm yet to try to use it as a backup medium for myself as most apps won't see the folder since it's only a few $ for 30GB. Downside is of course it means that the 30GB if full also chews up local storage..
Bevan

Sent using my BlackBerry® smartphone powered by Telecom New Zealand

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From: Martin Hughes <martin...@gmail.com>

Sender: techies-f...@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:53:45 +1200

[Gerard MacManus]

because most schools trash the image given and put on their own stuff

Gerard

[Tim Harper]

Feel free to send me the details - or if it is a SINA site tell me the school - and I'll interpret ...

When I look at my own school's traffic Google is right up there - the data below is up/download amounts for Google for the past week:

URL	Download KByte	KByte-%	Request	Req-%
mail.google.com	3368413	3.87	57254	1.49
www.google.co.nz	2438735	2.8	102397	2.66
docs.google.com	825240.1	0.95	2725	0.07
www.google.com	690445	0.79	53144	1.38
ssl.gstatic.com	555563.4	0.64	36884	0.96
t1.gstatic.com	541625.2	0.62	77879	2.02
t2.gstatic.com	541233.9	0.62	77885	2.02
t0.gstatic.com	538960.2	0.62	77244	2.01
t3.gstatic.com	537310.3	0.62	77289	2.01
kh.google.com	321778.2	0.37	26349	0.68
s.ytimg.com	286768.7	0.33	5197	0.14
apis.google.com	238978.7	0.27	6558	0.17
mw1.google.com	197942.3	0.23	9524	0.25
o-o.preferred.tnz-akl1.v12.lscache1.c.youtube.com	188273.3	0.22	148
l.yimg.com	182149.9	0.21	9693	0.25
i2.ytimg.com	147760.8	0.17	14378	0.37
www.gstatic.com	140989	0.16	6230	0.16

We've done ~ 800MB of Google Docs traffic.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Tim Harper]

G Drive does work behind SZ!  But the issue is G Drive.  If you have proxies set then G Drive uses those proxies.  If you have an authenticating proxy then G Drive fails because Google have not built in the ability to use authenticating proxies.  The next logical step is to make correct proxy exceptions.  But G Drive ignores proxy exceptions.  I've talked to Google about this and they have submitted both issues to the development team to fix but they have no time frame.

So, if you disable proxies G Drive works inside SZ.

The short term answer is to use Chrome and the Proxy Switch app.  Turn the proxy off and G Drive synchs.  Turn it on and you are back to normal.

I do worry about the amount of bandwidth that this could potentially consume, especially on first synch.  With 5GB of data per user multiplied by the number of users this even with modest use, could bring connections to a bit of a crawl.

Maybe the USB drive still has a place?  And for teachers most will have their data on their laptop anyway which makes synching to the cloud a bit pointless!

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Martin Hughes]

Thanks so much, for that Tim! Really detailed  and concise but not so complex that my little brain starts to implode:) Maybe if you hear back from Google you can let us know? I can see huge possibilities for G drive, esp with ICT late developers:)

[trevor storr]

Hi there,

GDrive working well behind authenticating SZ proxy here.  Just changed the filtering to allow online storage.  Pfsense with squid using the SZ squid as a parent.  We've set a large cache size.  MS updates are cached.  I guess a small amount of Ddoc stuff will be cached.  Youtube is very difficult to cache - but it can be done apparently.  Looking at the stats, youtube uses an order of magnitude more than google docs

cheers

trevor

--
cheers

Trevor

Trevor Storr
Director of eLearning, CantaNET http://educo.vln.school.nz
Waimate High School
Waimate
New Zealand

[Stu McGregor]

hi

my 2¢:

I would be very careful about big files being saved to GDrive. Say you have a 20MB document and you work on it over a day, it will be synced with every save. potentially 100MB/hour. I was working on a photoshop file with dropbox, it was 100MB and well, you can guess what was happening. That kind of usage can really chew through the bandwidth—and it's unnecessary. and as has already been mentioned, get a class full of this situation and you could chew thru a tonne of data.

stu

[Bevan McNaughton]

Exactly.

Luckily for us and (depending what plan/services your ISP offers) we have no data cap and Google Traffic is not speed rated on our CIR. 

SNAP and some others offer no data charges on Google Traffic (inc. YouTube) for example so depends how much you do want to allow through. 

Bevan

--

Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

Southland Girls' High School

328 Tweed Street

Invercargill 9812

Phone: +64 3 211 6030

Fax: +64 3 216 9010

[Craig Harrison]

Hi Tim,

 

You mention “And for teachers most will have their data on their laptop anyway which makes synching to the cloud a bit pointless” but what happens when their laptop is lost/stolen/crashes?

 

You may already have another backup/synchronisation solution in place for teachers laptops, or your staff may be particularly good at doing regular backups themselves.

 

If its synced to the cloud then they can jump on any other computer in any location on-site or off-site and immediately have access to their data with no need to restore/involve IT assistance.

 

And when their laptop is repaired/replaced they can sync it back again.

 

Kind regards,

 

Craig.

 

 

Craig Harrison
Information Systems Manager
Helpdesk: +64 9 520 9230
Direct: +64 9 520 9238
Phone: +64 9 520 9224 ext.7868
Mobile: +64 21 222 4107
char...@diocesan.school.nz

 
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[Tim Harper]

Hi Craig,

yes - we do have other initiatives that cover backing up staff data on their laptops.

The other issue with cloud services like G Drive is the "lack" of space and for many staff 5GB would not be enough!

But until we all get UFB-sized bandwidth it probably won't be a reality.  My focus in the mean time is making it work from a purely technical point of view so that things are ready to go when the pipes are big enough.

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Craig Harrison]

Hi Tim,

 

You will shortly be able to purchase more space for Google Drive for Google Apps for Education (centrally managed.)  You would need to compare the costs of this with the costs of other solutions for providing this storage and the features offered by each.

 

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177064

 

“Google says that the ability for Google Apps for Education users to buy more is coming in the next few weeks”

 

http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/04/24/google-apps-for-education-and-the-new-google-drive/

 

All dependent as you mention on being on a high performance internet connection with flat rate Google traffic.  Such plans and connections are becoming available now as someone else has mentioned.  Once again the cost of these plans and using the cloud storage would need to be weighed up against the cost of the equipment/support/etc.. to do it locally and do also provide a remote access and DR facility to the storage.

 

And all of us are watching the N4L project and the MoE licence deals closely….

 

Kind regards,

 

Craig.

[Patrick Dunford]

We prefer IE because there are a lot more customisations of it, locking down the settings to prevent students from messing with them is very extensively supported in IE.

 

Second issue is Google is fixated on making Chrome and some of their other apps work around security restrictions that administrators put in so their default install is a single user, if you try hard you might be able to make it work as a multi user but it boils down to Google telling me what they think should be allowed on my desktops and servers. There was an enterprise edition of Chrome that was multi user but it seems to have been withdrawn.

 

We use Firefox on servers because it isn't locked down on servers like IE is. I never wanted to put Chrome onto any server because Google again wants it to automatically update itself silently. We do not let anything on a server auto update (including Windows) in case it breaks a server.

 

Firefox has significantly more extension support than Chrome so this boils down to no real advantage for Chrome on my own personal desktop or home computer so I went back to Firefox on these.

Hi Gerard

Gerard

Hi Bevan

Sender: techies-for-schools@googlegroups.com

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:40:37 +1200

To: <techies-for-schools@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: techies-for-schools@googlegroups.com

[Gerard MacManus]

We have chrome working on our network with the group policy that is available, we have extensive control over our deployment and luckily found the policy on web apps before the students started putting angry birds within chrome.

Gerard

[Martin Hughes]

Chrome has been deployed across all the schools I work in and it works very, very well. I do believe, based on feedback and experience, that it is the best option for teachers and students and this, at the end of the day is what it's all about:)

Regards

Martin

Martin Hughes

CentreNet ICT PD Cluster Facilitator
Cell phone   021 2228364
Home phone   07 8593214

email martin...@clear.net.nz

[Bevan McNaughton]

We are trying to get everyone to use Chrome for e-mail/Google Apps due to the extra base functionality that it provides. In Chrome we have locked down some of the options with Group Policies and for many staff at present are steering them away from I.E due to irregular site behaviour whereas the browsing issues on the same sites don't eventuate with Chrome or Firefox.

For example our RD servers (Terminal Servers) keep telling students that on I.E (7, 8 & 9) Cookies are Disabled on some websites (i.e. some class WikiSpaces) - something that we have still not found a concrete answer for fixing.

In regards to bandwidth: I was just assessing our bandwidth use last night over KAREN (since our Google traffic is routed through it) and looking at the bandwidth use we are getting spikes of 40Mbps, however our model is easily around 60 concurrent users at peak demand with bandwidth to burn. If it was limited at our Internet CIR rate it would still be quite responsive. We are yet to ascertain how much data is actually being passed through for Google Apps per day however.

Even when we were over SchoolZone it wasn't too bad at 2Mbps SDSL.

Bevan McNaughton

--

Bevan McNaughton

Intranet Manager

Southland Girls' High School

[Tim Harper]

Chrome is great.  This runs on Chrome:

http://www.buildwithchrome.com 

Get your kids collaboratively working on designing something to go on your school "land" or replicate some iconic features in your town - the Ohakune Carrot, a Taihape Gumboot, The Paeroa Bottle, a Paua shell in Riverton ... or even build the Auckland Harbour Bridge!

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 0800 755 966 option 2 then 3 (SchoolZone)
Phone 03 443 5167 (DDI)
Mobile 027 617 9968
Fax 03 443 9900

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz