Originally Posted By: hybrid8
And therein lies another potential problem. Matt mentioned the ISP complained about spam, but was it based on content, quantity or both? It's going to be very difficult to isolate the responsible party if the content is spam but the quantity falls within the typical mail use for other users on his network.

That's an excellent point. I'm not sure exactly what the ISP told them. All I was told was "someone in the building is sending spam messages." That's incredibly vague and unhelpful, but I don't blame my contacts at the facility. That's been a problem with this ISP before (Speakeasy) where they just inform us of something with no information, and tell us to take care of it. Hey, these are 80 college-aged kids. Chances are at least one of them is going to know their way around the computer enough to do what they want, but that's all it takes to bring down the connection for everyone. It would be extremely helpful to be able to identify the troublemaker.

I've told Tomato's QoS to give zero priority to bittorrent and filesharing traffic, but who knows how effective that is. I have much less of a clue how to tackle this spam issue.

But thanks for the input, everyone. I'll try to sift through it all and see if I can figure it out. I'm new to most of the world of networking. Hell, I crimped my first network cable this week for another client smile Just never had to do that before...
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Matt