Been on the 6.3 fw for a couple of weeks now. Kudos to the developers on a nice job. Number 1, this rev is completely stable for us. In fact, a small glitch whereby the real time stats page would get sluggish to scroll up/down after a few hours of displaying, now responds instantly regardless of how long the stats have been on display.
Number 2, the new scheduling feature for Outbound Policies is very helpful. By combining scheduling with the Bandwidth Allowance Monitor Settings, much of the periodic manual configuration changes we forced to make throughout the month are no longer required, and we are much closer to a set-it-and-forget-it solution.
However, there is one feature request that would make our environment even more automated. Our Balance 30 has the three WAN ports connected to three satellite links, from two different vendors (HughesNet and Exede). Having three satellite internet dishes is somewhat akin to raising three ADD children; they always need attention of some kind. ;>
Each vendor’s dish has slightly different usage policy characteristics. With satellite it’s ALL ABOUT data caps. One vendor has a free time period overnight, the other has a cap, but with a separate data allowance from apart from daytime usage. Each vendor begins and ends there nighttime usage period at different times. Even so, as noted above, by combining Outbound Policy scheduling with Bandwidth Allowance Monitor Settings we have been able to set policies to accommodate this schizophrenic behavior.
The one setting that has not been working is with the Bandwidth Allowance Monitor Setting on the HughesNet dish. The Balance 30 is not tracking usage anywhere near what HughesNet reports on its usage stats page. I have finally learned the reason for this. HughesNet is only tracking DOWNLOAD usage statistics. The Bandwidth Allowance Monitor Setting is tracking combined up/down usage. Therefore the Balance thinks we have exhausted our data cap long before we really have. I tried “handicapping” by setting the Monthly Allowance figure higher, but since the ratio between uploads and downloads constantly varies this solution is not working.
Ideally, if there was a choice in the Bandwidth Allowance Monitor Setting section to check a box to granularly set whether down data, up data, or both are tracked, that would solve our problem. That’s the feature request please.
thanx
jim