McAfee agent 5.x causes network stability issues which impacts Skype

We experienced some intermittent network stability issues recently in Skype. The issues reported were random client disconnections, mainly impacting wireless users, but some wired users were affected to a lessor extent.  Users would experience either poor call quality or a dropped call when the issue would arise.

Our network team found that the root cause was related to spikes in ARP traffic every 30 minutes, resulting in the poor Skype call experience.  It was determined that that a new setting in the recently distributed McAfee agent 5.x was the source of this ARP traffic.

Installing the McAfee 5.x agent management modules into ePO console introduces a new feature called Peer-to-Peer.

•             The two settings in this tab are enabled by Default.

•             The result was all ePO managed systems running the 5.x agent would attempt to reach other managed systems using the default ePO UDP broadcast port 8082, which in turn created ARP broadcast storms.

McAfee advises that the Peer-to-Peer service should not be enabled on networked laptops, yet it is enabled by Default in the new 5.x version.  McAfee support has fielded many complaints from customers who have experienced this issue.  The simple fix is to disable the setting to avoid any network disruption caused by the ARP broadcasts.