Packet Shaping

ALSO CALLED: PacketHound, Network Traffic Shaping, Traffic Shaping
DEFINITION: PacketHound is a product that aims to help an enterprise regulate traffic that might otherwise slow services down for all users of a local area network. PacketHound is intended to address the concern of businesses and universities about the downloading of large files, especially music files in the MP3 format, using Napster, Gnutella, and similar approaches. PacketHound can also monitor and reduce  … 
Definition continues below.

PACKET SHAPING DEFINITION (continued): …  the number of streaming media files that are downloaded by network users. Both businesses and universities are concerned not only about such traffic slowing down the network for other uses, but also about the possibility of being sued by music companies for loss of intellectual property. According to Palisade Systems, the developers of PacketHound, Napster and Gnutella traffic has had a significant effect in performance on a number of university networks.Although Gnutella uses a known port number that a network firewall server could screen for, the port number can be changed by a sophisticated … 
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