Discrepancy between Starband and Bandwidth Manager?

Has anyone else run into this problem? I am finding a pretty large discrepancy between the usage the BWM reports and the usage Starband is reporting. About half the time the two will match and the other half the time I see a discrepancy ranging from 100mb to 500mb a day difference between Starband and the BWM, with the Starband report showing the higher usage. This of course is of great concern since if we use too much data we get turned off and can not do business.

My rule set for this network is managed by individual IP address rules since there are no dynamic users, every user is a company work station. Each rule for each IP monitors any IPv4 protocol, on the LAN interface and I have two rules for each computer, one for Uploading and one for Downloading.

I realized that my rules are applied to IPv4 based traffic, so I just created a blocking rule for IPv6 but I don't think that's the problem. I only have a small handful of computers running Windows 7 which supports IPv6.

I also have my DHCP server turned off so anyone who might sneak into an office and try to hook up will not be given an IP address and would need specific knowledge of our network to create a static IP. And even if they did I would see their usage on the BWM usage report, and I have found no unexplained usage.

Any ideas?

Thanks for the help
-Nick

Try adding a catch-all rule at the end of the ruleset, that captures any protocol and permits unlimited access.

If you see that rule's DL/UL counters climbing up quickly, then it's obviously some traffic that wasn't processed by preceding rules.

If that's the case, we can start narrowing down what it may be.

Thanks Andrew.

So I set-up that rule a rule days ago. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to capturing anything.

For 11/25 the BWM says 514mb Down and Starband says 650mb Down and the catch-all rule says 3.26mb Down. Small difference, no biggie

For 11/26 the BWM says 563mb Down and Starband says 1000mb Down!! and the catch-all says 13.6mb Down. Huge Difference, this is killing me.

Any other ideas? Anyone else have experience with Starband and incorrect reporting? I just can't figure out if it is us or Starband. And if it is us then how is it going around the BWM?

-Nick

Here is my current rule set. I have individual rules for each IP, one for up and one for down. This shows the first set of down rules. The only difference between down and up is the direction and the source/destination details are reversed.

Well, this could also be the traffic of the server itself. If the rules all apply on the LAN interface, there's a chance the server downloads something via its WAN interface, in which case it may not be recorded.

Please export your complete ruleset to a .DB file and email it to support at softperfect.com. I will check it for any possible omissions.