but when your user pays per megabyte, and suddenly his Windows downloads new service pack - how do you explain him, that those hundreds megabytes are accounted correctly, when he just opened facebook page?..
Well if that customer is not educated enough to know that his computer does stuff without him telling it to do so,
he should not be using one Windows DOES tell the user it has downloaded updates and would like to install them.
Also, I think he would be a lot more pissed if his computer would keep
nagging him that it’s not able to download windows updates. It’s a bit of a chicken/egg problem…
Security questions aside, there’s the problem of bandwidth consumption by the growing number of applications that frequently check-in to services outside of the corporate network and download content. As the network administrator I want to decide when or if these applications are communicating to the Internet and what is being transmitted. One of the challenges I face comes from common applications downloading updates individually when I would rather download the update once and deploy to all inside the LAN. An application installed on 100 computers, Adobe or Java for example, may get downloaded 100 times if left up to the application. My preference would be to have that file be downloaded exactly one time and be deployed internally, at LAN speed, on the schedule of my choosing (so as not to disrupt the end user). Unfortunately, there is a growing list of applications that are pre-configured to “phone home” and download updates at “their” whim.
Microsoft’s WSUS affords us the opportunity to download updates just once across the Internet link and deploy internally on the LAN.
Our Antivirus solution is configurable to download just once to a server and deploy out to distribution points across our enterprise.
Unfortunately, not all vendors supply an update solution for their applications and 3rd party tools must be utilized or, if you have the personnel, the sneaker net option. This is unfortunate since it means that the updates are being downloaded far more often than necessary which affects the available bandwidth of the Internet and ultimately costs all of us more money.
However you look at it, the person behind the original post has valid concerns. I recommend that you do your best to block as much unknown, unsuspected, unwanted traffic traversing your Internet connection and seek out internal software update tools to better control the environment for the betterment of your end user’s experience with accessing work-related content on the Internet and your company’s network security.
Years later we can see a concern especially with Windows 10.
Is there a way in Mikrotik to block akamai content?
I have a new motel client in a small rural area that only has 8Mbps download. They have 48 rooms and when akamai speaks no one else can use the network.