What happens when the cloud meets a bandwidth cap? | Hacker News Reader

What happens when the cloud meets a bandwidth cap?

gigaom.com

Perhaps this is a case of a bandwidth cap that's working as intended? If people figure out where they're wasting bandwidth and fix it, that's more bandwidth for everyone else. Without any incentives, who knows how long it would have taken?

Gotta love utility computing. One minute your paying a fair market price of $3/mo comparable to Mozy, Carbonite or Backblaze. Next thing you know you are paying 33 times what you should have. Reminds me of the good old days of Compuserve and AOL. I remember getting this crazy $300 bill after discovering Neverwinter Nights II. Steep price for text adventuring.

if anyone is in a similar situation, the tools you need (for linux at least) are etherape and then wireshark. the first will show you which machine is transmitting lots of data. the second will give you a good idea what that data is (if it's not already obvious from the destination computer shown in etherape).

what are the windows and mac equivalents?

Wireshark. After all, libpcap has been ported to all platforms worth mentioning.

I suspect that JungleDisk is primarily to blame here. Most programs (certainly the Windows search indexer) already know to treat files on network drives differently, otherwise they'd be unusable in business environments where you have a variety of SMB shares mounted on every computer.

If JungleDisk appears as a local drive, there's your problem. This is just speculation though, as I can't be bothered to give them my credit card details just to test that theory.

You misunderstood what the problem was. It was not that JungleDisk was downloading backup data, it was that since the AWS 'drive' is mounted as a local drive, when indexing happened (or when the antivirus scanned the files), Windows (or the antivirus) would download all the data they where trying to access. I'd actually go with the antivirus in this case, but it certainly is not JungleDisk's fault.

Yeah, still Wireshark on Mac, though if you wanted something a little user friendlier, you might be able to get a clue from LittleSnitch's network monitor. If you open it up, it shows all the applications that are currently making network requests and where the request is going to. I suspect in a case like the article's, it would show JungleDisk constantly connecting to AWS, and if you knew it wasn't supposed to be uploading/downloading something right now, that would narrow it down pretty fast.

I had a similar issue with a bug in Jungledisk 6 months ago. Jungledisk would download folders with UTF8 characters in the path repeatedly.

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