Enabling Bittorrent at the University Level?

Sorthum asks: "I'm a network administrator for a small university (approximately 5000 students all told). We're running NAT in the dorms, which obviously restricts BitTorrent traffic. We do an annual student survey, on which 'Residential Network' is listed as the number 2 complaint. This translates more or less into 'Bittorrent is slow here.' My boss is in a frenzy to appease the users at virtually any cost, but it seems to me from my research that the only real way to improve Bittorrent speeds is to start assigning public IPs to the dorms. Add to that the potential liability of making a service that by most reports has upward of 90% of its traffic fall into a 'legally questionable' gray area, how can I win in this situation?"

Re:You have to decide what's important

[aitikin]

I am currently attending a university where they shape traffic. I have been here for as long as the shaping system has been in place and I have heard nothing but complaints. Granted, the university implemented CleanAccess as well, but most of the complaints seem to be related to the shaping and I don't work in ITS, so this is all just what I have picked up from living here. The most common complaint seems to be how slow the network is period, not just for P2P purposes. I can't even connect to the completely legitimate website www.ilounge.com, it never times out, it just keeps on "transmitting data".

I apparently can't use any proxy servers either. If I do a download from a sourceforge mirror, it comes in at about 40 kb/s which isn't too bad, but if I do a download from bit torrent I'm lucky if it comes in at .5 kb/s. This effectively prohibits me from effiently installing a customized Linux distribution, like Gentoo, because I can't install any packages at any relative speed.

In response to the shaping, which functions more like bandwidth limiting, an individual within the dorms has set up a DC++ hub, so while we may not be able to get anything from outside the network, we can at least get things from within. This just goes to show you that no matter what you do to "limit" illegal activities, people will find a way. So my answer to the OP would be to let them have it, just limit the actual bandwidth they can use, which is similar to how University of Illinois handles the problem.

Limit how?

[khasim]

It all depends upon how you limit the bandwidth.

#1. Shrink the individual pipes to total_bandwidth/number_of_students? So you always get sucky performance?

#2. Cap the daily/weekly/monthly download/upload? So you get sucky performance during the first half of that period, but great performance once everyone else has hit their caps. And what happens when you have a legit need to go to a site after you've hit your cap?

#3. Do it like Frame Relay where you can "burst" to the available bandwidth? But if everyone is try to burst, you get sucky performance anyway.

#4. "Shape" the bandwidth based upon protocol and use one of the above methods to share that bandwidth? This works as long as there's no way to masquerade as a different protocol.

Each way has its own problems.

Re:Incorrect premise

[dircha]

Yes it does. Let me explain, for your benefit and for the benefit of the topic submitter.

If your client does not accept incoming external connections and share torrents (if your client is not on an externally accessible device and you don't have port forwarding configured), all other peers will assign you a priority lower than every other peer that is sharing.

This doesn't just mean you will be last in line to receive the requested torrent. It means that all other clients will relegate your request to the small segment of bandwidth configured to be set aside for non-sharing peers.

While it is possible for you to still obtain a fast download speed in the case that your request is fielded by such a large number of peers either whose bandwidth is under utilized or collectively whose non-sharing peer bandwidth allocation gives you an acceptable transfer rate, in most every case your download speed will be only a fraction of what it would be were you sharing.

And while I have not used BitTorrent in a long time now, it would not surprise me if clients were to implement logic to completely cut off "deadbeat" peers (freeloaders) such as yourself. Clients are by default configured to share with non-sharing peers not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is advantageous to allow peers who did not previously have anything to share to get a footing in the network on the premise that some of those peers may go on to become outstanding sharers. If however a peer downloads a great deal of data but fails to begin sharing within a reasonable period of time, that peer is probably a freeloader and can be safely blacklisted.

The "little extra time for things to get up to speed" you are seeing is the wait for all other leechers ahead of you to finish, opening up room in peers' non-sharing peer bandwidth to accomodate you.

Which I hope speaks to the question of why on earth would this university network administrator want to allow his users to use university bandwidth to get bonus points with copyright infringers so that they themselves can infringe copyright more effectively...

If you must do something, why don't you quietly encourage them to setup their own torrents on the local intranet? Surely between an entire campus of students there is enough shareable music to keep them occupied.