[Hash]

Our faculty has been connected to internet through a large network of the whole university, but we have a problem:
1. we are expanding our computer labs and adding a lot of new users
2. The university network during peak usage hours virtually stalls (it doesnt have large bandwith)

So, we want to have another ISP connection, solely for our faculty, while still being connected to main university network. Is possible to configure it that way? It will need BGP and bridging disallowed, am I right? Also, we would like to have good office intranet mail, and if possible, use the intranet addresses for external mail as well.

Any suggestions and recommendations will be highly appreciated.

[tooki]

I'm not a network specialist, but I believe that all the stuff you want to do is routing. An enterprise router, professionally configured, should do the trick.

tooki

[Tomster]

Sounds like a job for bandwidth shaping. This is basically an issue of QoS, quality of service, and can be managed with an old pentium box, two network cards, a linux install, and some bandwidth shaping software. A CS faculty member or your local unix/linux geek can get you set up in a few hours. Granted, this will not increase your overall bandwidth, but you can arrange things so the faculty always have priority, thus the slow down will be felt by the students only. Try a google on the subject as this area is now beginning to become more of an issue in home situations with VoIP and standard broadband.

[tooki]

Sounds to me like a job for enterprise routers. Traffic shaping (what he called bandwidth shaping) won't solve the core problem -- at best, it would delay the correct fix. (My old college tried doing just that -- it didn't help, and they did have to end up getting a bigger pipe to the Internet because traffic shaping really is just a stopgap measure.)

tooki

[Hash]

Thanks for all replies! Let me clarify the situation: we want to use the university network while having an auxiliary or additional ISP for our faculty only (and the faculty is still within the university network), so we can use it when the university bandwith is saturated yet we do not want other university faculties to access our ISP since it will bring down our additional connection to stall as well. Thats why I am thinking about bridging.

[tooki]

That is the situation for an enterprise router. It inspects a packet, determines where it's going, and then sends it through the correct interface out to the ISP or network as needed.

tooki