UC Irvine Cracks Down on P2P 550
grendel20 writes "After years of dialup, one thing I was looking forward to the most about college was the fast ethernet connection. Upon arriving at UCI though, I found my kazaa speeds to be way below subpar. Apparently, UCI has limited access for all P2P programs with this fine piece of hardware. Now what do I do?" Whether you agree with what UC Irvine is doing or not, I do applaud them for publicizing and being straightforward about it. Upstream entities can implement these sorts of controls without telling users, and it's tempting to do so because it will reduce the number of user complaints.
Cry like a baby (Score:3, Funny)
Sucks that the college is using it's bandwith for education, eh?
Glory be (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a box on a popular dorm network in Cambridge, MA. The net had become basically unusable because P2P file-sharing programs were chattering all the time. Even ssh connections to my machine were sluggish. Then the school decided to rate-limit the P2P traffic to 1Mbps. All problems vanished.
Free ethernet is a good thing. If you're at a hip school you may even be able to run servers on your machines. Recognize a good thing when you've got it!@
Reeeeeeeally Sloooooooow News Day.... (Score:2)
QoS is the answer you want (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that you can't have students sucking down gigs of bandwidth to grab the lastest porn flicks off of the gnutellaNet, because it costs you too much to keep them and your "legit" users happy. So set up a QoS system. I'd probably like to have a quota of bandwidth that each person gets per month...and after they've exhausted that bandwidth, they only get network space if there's free space on the network -- their priority drops.
So if 128.2.154.2 is sucking down more than his fair share and exhausts his entire quota in the first day of the month. After that, his priority at the router gets knocked down to "two" and his performance suffers. If the network's already jammed, his packet is the first to get dropped. That way, you let people who want to do P2P do P2P, and keep the people who just want a snappy SSH server keep a snappy SSH server.
Since you don't really need real-time response (calculating used bandwidth once an hour in a perl script or something is more than enough), you can do this offline. If I were using a Linux router:
Set up iptables on each router so that you have a chain that sums the bandwidth used by each host in the network that it routes to. Hourly, poll each of the routers and get the latest usage statistics, and regenerate prioritization rulesets based on these. Send these back out to the routers.
Since you can do this offline at your NOC, you can do fancy stuff like sum all the bandwidth used by all the IPs allocated to a single user and stuff like that. Give each user 2GB/month, and if they want to use 1GB on their laptop and 500MB on each of their two desktops, that's okay too.
There is a few potential problems. Technically advanced students could try setting up VPNs. Shouldn't be a huge issue, just means that a slightly larger body of people get 100% utilization of quota.
IP spoofing is always a potential issue, but no end of problems can be caused by IP spoofing already, and the consequences aren't *disasterous* in this case -- if a massive flood of spoofed data is slipped by the sysadmin, the victim would just get somewhat worse performance.
Now, that assumes that the bottleneck is at the outgoing connection to your installation. If it's the LAN and your box is hooked up to a simple switch or hub...well, not much you can do there.
Finally, it's difficult for students to "find loopholes" in rulesets that detect whether software is P2P or not and take advantage of them. Many suggestions that try to rate-limit P2P traffic and P2P traffic alone are vulnerable to this.
That being said, it's also nice to run a big Web opaque proxy server with a policy of no logging (most people get leery of optional proxy servers if they log what they're doing). Also, if you have a bunch of hard drives sitting around, you can set up a Freenet node and do the same thing -- have a big local cache for users
Re:Cry like a baby (Score:3, Insightful)
You may notice that accessing someone elses PC on the network here goes pretty quick, but loading a web page is slow. You may try to ssh in from outside and find that slow.
Why?
Because inbound or internal bandwidth isn't a problem at all... its outbound. Its not the people AT the university using the network... its the people outside who are finding the stuff you are sharing and downloading it that are causing the vast majority of the bandwith usage.
All in all the answer, which I hate to give, is that people at dorms need to stop with the offering to the world of files on p2p systems. The bandwith usage is too great and it does most certainly hinder other peoples use of the network.
Your tutiton and that of your fellow students "pays" for the network (actually your tuition may pay for alot less than you think, the life blood of most Universities is the endowment, some schools could even run off it and not charge Tuition, Harvard being one example)
Sharing MP3s with the world is essentially allocating resources to people not in the University community. Now I don't mean to say thats bad or there is no good in doing it, however, when it becomes the single largest use of bandwith and interferes with others use of resources... then something bad is certanly going on.
Now here, rate limiting is defense of our network as the traffic caused by p2p filesharing is causing some of the routing equipment to run right up against its max capacity, and thats not a good way to be. If we try to throw more bandwith at it, we will just be more attractive to people downloading, and usage goes up to utilize the bandwith... rate limiting is the only scenario with a win there.
So the next time you can access across the boarders of your own network with reasonable speed, be glad p2p is rate limited. And the next time you can downlaod something via a p2p, again be glad that it wasn't shut off completely.
Bandwith is a limited resource... students need to learn to share it and use it wisely.
-Steve
Re:Cry like a baby (Score:3, Interesting)
How do I know all this? This is the job I do. I spent all of yesterday and this morning working on a Packeteer Packetshaper 4545. We don't block P2P. That's not the stance we felt we should take. We do however greatly limit the amount of bandwidth P2P applications can consume. We allot more to P2P after business hours. It's really interesting to watch response times plummet when I reboot the PS. For about 20 seconds, ping times climb to 800-1000ms. If I disable bandwidth shaping (which I did for about 10 minutes this summer to make a point during a meeting about the PS) P2P apps climb to the top and sufficate everything else. I can tell you that every regent's Unv in my state that is using a PS is severely limiting the amount of outbound bandwidth that's alloted to applications like P2P. Here at this Unv I give a average priority of 3 to all traffic classes that have known uses on campus. I set the default priorities to 2. I then raised the priority on HTTP and FTP to make them more responsive. I also gave a high priority to terminal emulators like SSH, telnet, and tn3270. Time sensitive applications like NTP and DNS were given a higher then average priority. I use garunteed partitions on different classes or groups of classes to kick start them or limit their consumption. It has worked extremely well for us.
P2P is a major thorn in our collective sides when it comes to the network. I don't think it should be blocked. I don't think that at all. I've gone to great lengths to ensure that it isn't entirely blocked and that other applications have the resources they need. I do think it needs to be kept under control so it doesn't hurt everyone else, those few students that actually use their connections to research and learn. Users that try to get around our bandwidth shaping by setting up tunnels to their buddies cable modem, using NNTP, HTTP, or FTP simply aggravate us and push closer to charging per megabyte transferred. I hope that day never comes.
So what's the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funding. (Score:2, Informative)
The UC system is funded (as I found out as a student) mostly by tax money, Federal grants, Private funding, etc. Student fees are just a drop in the bucket. This said, the cost of bandwidth comes straight from the limited, non-student-funded budget, leaving less money available for other IT programs, such as campus-wide wifi.
Personally, I'd take a wifi program over p2p anyday.
Sing along with me (Score:2, Funny)
MP3 Killed the Media Star
Clicking away downloading right to my hard drive
In my own home there was nothing that they could do
They filed the lawsuits at your university
System administrators block port 63
Because I utilize the bandwidth on the T
I bet your parents... never used WinAmp
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
Napster came and spread you far
And now we hang out at a foreclosed record store
We see the shelves that used to hold CD's and more
And you remember... the industry would go
You can't hear music... unless you pay us
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
In my Rio and on drive C
On free web sites and FTP
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
In my Rio and on drive C
On free web sites and FTP
Napster came and spread you far
Put the blame on CDR's
You are a media star...
You are a media star...
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
MP3 killed the media star
- poem by David Tiberio(Song available at http://robomusic.com/ in MP3 format)
Re:So what's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is simply no way to allow for everyone using P2P and keep a usable network at the same time, without increasing costs. I've seen what happens when Napster overloaded our network, and after they applied packetshaping the usability was 100% better. And during off-peak times, Napster speeds went back up, so you could still do your downloading in the mornings.
Re:So what's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
The statistic about 10% of the users using 90% of the bandwidth is correct. It's not fair to everyone else.
Study (Score:3, Funny)
Not Alone (Score:2, Informative)
Device (Score:5, Informative)
Education opportunities (Score:2, Insightful)
Freedom versus usage (Score:5, Insightful)
No moral judgement? (Score:2, Insightful)
So do you consider hosting providers which allow spammers to use their networks to not be making a moral judgement, as well?
Bravo for UC Irvine if they can avoid getting sued for what they're doing, but they are most certainly making a moral judgement.
Re:No moral judgement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Er. Sued? UC Irvine is just enforcing the terms and conditions of their student internet use policy. I haven't seen it, but I'm sure they've got one, and I'm nearly positive it looks like the ones any other university has. They're not censoring anything; they're not blocking anything. They're just prioritizing.
You want fast and cheap internet access? You accept their terms. You want to use university resources? Fine. Use them for academic purposes. Shocking. The administration will even wink and nod at some 'personal' use. Sensible. It means that people won't be trying nearly so hard to get around restrictions.
Value judgement? Well, sort of. Some would call it setting priorities. The campus pipe is only so wide. Does first call on that bandwidth go to people who are reading journal articles, sharing experimental results, and--heaven forbid--learning? Or does it go to the guy in the room down the hall who's too lazy and too cheap to go out to rent a copy of The Matrix?
In the majority of workplaces that I have experienced (and most have had an academic slant) as well as my university, network administrators have cared not one little bit about what I did with surplus bandwidth. As long as you don't screw things up for people doing real work--that's all that matters.
Re:No moral judgement? (Score:2, Interesting)
I would liken it to an employee using the company copy machine for personal use. The company is paying for something it shouldn't be. In this case, the state is paying for something they shouldn't be: use of their network for purposes not in line with the school's mission and purpose.
Re:No moral judgement? (Score:2)
A closer analogy with regards to spamming would be to say that neither email nor file sharing are inherently wrong, but they become wrong when used to do certain things such as spam or infringe copyright. I'm sure that the university's AUP disallows both of these inappropriate uses of the facilities, and action is taken when they are notified of problems.
If the file-sharing side of things is bandwidth-limited, then that's a matter of practical resource management rather than morality.
I should point out that I don't necessarily consider infringing copyright to be an intrinsic "wrong" -- more of a "technical wrong". Any action which infringes copyright breaks the law -- but this has little bearing on whether the action is fair or unfair, right or wrong.
Right on. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Right on. (Score:2)
I remember tb2 five years ago, heh.
Re:Right on. (Score:5, Funny)
Kevin Guidry
UWF ResNet Coordinator
Re:Right on. (Score:2)
What "crackdown"? (Score:2)
This is just maintaining the health of the network by not allowing it to become clogged by a few users of bandwidth-heavy applications, just like when I unplug my little sister's Cat5 from the router when she lets WinMX use the whole house's upstream bandwidth.
Tim
Re:What "crackdown"? (Score:2)
Tim
Says it all... (Score:5, Insightful)
"We found that over 50% of the network traffic leaving the housing network headed out the Internet was from one single file sharing application. """
" 1. All network traffic to/from any UCI computer, web site or server is untouched. There are no controls and no need to shape this, as it is "educational" traffic. Further, as it does not go to or from the Internet, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it stays within the UCI network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus."
My congratulations to UC Irvine. This sounds like an excellent solution.
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
This would be a great feature for P2P developers to add - the ability to first search an internal network for your file before resorting to a search of the wider internet.
Tim
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
But it is something to look at when I get into college.
Tim
Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Informative)
solution: blocked i2 traffic thereby keeping it all internal...there were already enough users from our school that it didn't make too much a difference, and the more people that heard about it the more that got on....now we have an insanely fast DC hub just on the internal network where you can find just about anything!
Re:Says it all... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Says it all... (Score:2, Insightful)
Next, from my rather lefty perspective, I find an inordinate number of the Slashdot crowd irritatingly libertarian. It's all about perspective.
Re:Says it all... (Score:2)
In other words, the people you disagree with are hypocrites, but your contradictory opinions are alright.
Plus, you're ascribing these two contradictory opinions to your opponents without any proof that anybody actually thinks that way. Can you say, "strawman agrument?"
Re:Says it all... (Score:2)
Nope, I'm just as hypocritical. Takes one to know one, as they say.
Some schools don't own up to it (Score:2)
It literally ruins any protocol that isn't HTTP.
They don't own up to its existence.
I applaud UC Irvine for admitting the PacketShaper's presence on their LAN.
Re:Some schools don't own up to it (Score:2)
Then they aren't using a packetshaper. They only depriortize packets, not "ruin" them.
UCIrvine = twits (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:UCIrvine = twits (Score:2, Insightful)
And why are you blaming them for not knowing security? _you're_ the one that got your password stolen. Be responsible for your own information.
Re:UCIrvine = twits - precious (Score:2, Funny)
and later...
[UCIrvine should be] firewalled from the rest of the net, as they don't know anything about security
Pot enters room
"Hi, kettle, did you know you're black."
High Tuition sucks (Score:5, Funny)
You complain about kazaa (with all of it's lovely spyware) being slow. The rest of campus was probably complaining about *everything else* being slow.
Here's a tip: go to school to get an education. Or at least leave your dorm room once a month. Download speeds become irrele....er... not as important once you discover girls and beer.
Re:High Tuition sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
DURING BUSINESS HOURS (read, when the student body is supposed to be in class) some 40% of our BACKBONE bandwidth is taken up by P2P running between the dorms. Personally, I'd like to see all that traffic blocked at the layer 3 switches, but that will not happen in an academic environment.
The net result is that if I connect to my Linux box at home to perform a security test on a Unix box at work (you're not testing unless you're attacking from an uinauthorized host), I have a terminal with a frame rate problem
In short, quitcherbitching
(and yes, I am one of those terribly libertarian slashdotters, but the ownership of a resource implies the right to control it's use)
Not Uncommon... (Score:2)
What he really meant (Score:5, Funny)
grendel20 writes "After years of using dialup (because I'm too cheap for cable/DSL), one thing I was looking forward to the most about college was not the girls, not the college experience, not the beer, and DEFINITELY not the higher level of education, but the saturating of the fast ethernet dorm connection by downloading things I'm too cheap to pay for. Upon arriving at UCI though, I found my freeloading movie/porn/software experience to be subpar. Apparently, UCI has limited access for all P2P programs with this fine piece of hardware. Now what do I do? Go out and not sit in front of my computer?!?!?!?!"
What other schools and students have done (both go (Score:5, Insightful)
This has caused an even bigger problem because the school sees the dorms using obcene amounts of bandwidth on 80 and to control it they have limited the dorms to just 5 megabits. In theory that is fine, until you count 800 students in the dorms and there being 13 megabits of pipe for this school. The Packet Shaper has destroyed the ability of students to use the internet from their rooms as it causes huge latency, in the order of 4.7 seconds at most (that I've seen) and averaging around 2 seconds (yes, seconds). Normal programs can't handle such latency and send out more and more requests while thinking the earlier packets were lost. P2P programs on the other hand have no problem dealing with large latency.
Speaking as a student who is suffering because of the P2P abuse of others, be good, if you use the P2P stuff don't leave it on and be responsible otherwise the school may crack down on the students harder then you ever thought was possible.
P.S. To make this post I am connecting to the internet via an old dial up modem as it is faster then the connection in the dorms, my school was once rated as the 8th most wired college in the nation by Yahoo... oh how the mighty have fallen.
Re:What other schools and students have done (both (Score:2)
No port restrictions, you use your weekly allocation in whatever way you like, once it's gone, they drop you to 0.5Kb/sec so you can still get email and text services, slowly.
PacketShaper works at Layer 7, not just Layer 4 (Score:2)
The really amazing thing is, the PacketShaper itself is easy to configure and run, and should the box lose power or be unplugged, it becomes a passive device. I'm constantly amazed by how easy it is to prioritize traffic with the little purple box.
The best part is, when you block ports, network bandwidth abusers look for a work-around. When you throttle bandwidth, the abusers usually assume it's just a lousy connection and usually don't give you much grief.
Re:What other schools and students have done (both (Score:3)
that was a mistake on your netadmin's part for two reasons
(i) As someone else said, they could have still filtered traffic based on the protocol, or even class of protocol, it does not matter what port it's on. The packetshaper inspects the contents of the data portion of the TCP packet and determines the protocol from there. ( btw. the linux kernel has packet shaping code built in as well )
(ii)While using the shaper we found an interesting problem. Throttling creates a shit load of traffic inself. When the packet is throttled TCP resets and timeouts increase, the more traffic you're throttling, the more 'protocol overhead' traffic you will see. That traffic alone is enough to bring a network to its knees. This is likely what you're seeing.
Shaping can only do so much, the more you try to squeeze a large pipe using shaping, the more protocol traffic is generated, hence the more inefficent it gets.
Re:What other schools and students have done (both (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, there are a lot of universities across North America that run PacketShapers for the very purpose of controlling P2P traffic. I work for Packeteer [packeteer.com], and universities/schools have been an important customer since P2P networks blossomed...
Umm...who cares? (Score:2)
This is pretty standard across the board - traffic shapers are a good way to keep P2P traffic to a minimum without frivolously trying to cut it out.
In related news, the routing technology for these things is pretty cool, though certainly not new. A story about DIY traffic shapers would be a better front page story than this, Michael.
Packet SHapers (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, at least you admit it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but tough. Just like what happened at USC [slashdot.org], they have every damn right to do so.
Perhaps you should start looking for other positive things about universities - like, maybe, a higher education?
Since Censorship is evil.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Resx (etc.) (Score:3, Interesting)
McMaster actually paid a company to write a Kazaa-clone that would only work on the LAN. It was cheaper than bandwith-shaping the Internet pipe. However, I doubt all universities will do this.
My recommendation to you is to find other P2P people and set up a Direct Connect [neo-modus.com] hub or something similar. Make it only avaialbe to people within the university.
Good luck!
-cruz
Re:Resx (etc.) (Score:2)
Re:Resx (etc.) (Score:2)
I wonder if they'll get sued (Score:2, Troll)
Therefore, of the 60 mbs total bandwidth, 5 - 10 mbs is set aside for P2P.
Sounds perilously close to contributory copyright infringement to me.
Re:I wonder if they'll get sued (Score:2)
Re:I wonder if they'll get sued (Score:3, Insightful)
Not *everything* on P2P is copyrighted materials.
That didn't save napster.
Excellent! (Score:2)
5 - 10 Mbps is nothing to sneeze at. I had a 10baseT card for a long time, and it seemed rocket-fast.
Besides, if you want to download porn fast, get it from the web.
Lose-Lose Situation for P2P (Score:2)
Georgia Tech manages to limit P2P uploading only so you can still download at full speed. I don't use P2P at all, but the limiting they put in place this semester has worked perfectly in keeping lots of bandwidth available and pings low. Prior to the rate limits, we were saturated 24/7 and couldn't even ping local Atlanta sites at less than half a second.
I wish my school had that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Naturally, I'm looking at IEEE XPlore, which lets me see nearly the entire archive of IEEE papers in PDF format over the internet.
So I start the download...and it goes at 5kb/sec. Its like I'm on a modem. Why? Because a few people in my dorm are wasting my time uploading music and software illegally.
Later, I go out to my class and realize that I forgot to put my homework on my school account. So I start up an sftp session and start downloading it. But it goes at BYTES per second. Why? Because people in my dorm are wasting my time sharing music and software.
Why don't you have some curtesy for your fellow students and stop wasting their time when you waste yours? The internet at school is not for your personal enjoyment; its so that you can be a better student.
I left the dorms and got a house, and now I'm using cable modem in a neighborhood almost without students (which means without file-sharing). Even though the cable company has less total bandwidth than the school, latency is down and connection speeds are up compared to living in the dorm.
You have no right to fuck up my connection (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You have no right to fuck up my connection (Score:2)
I'm the ResNet Coordinator at my university and I have yet to speak to any students this year about consuming excessive bandwidth. When I do (and I will - the year is young) I am more than happy to grant exceptions to students such as yourself who can show a legitimate need for the bandwidth. Your use of the bandwidth to further your education and learn is the *reason* that we pay for it each month! I wish some students like yourself would get sent to my office so I could copy your Linux & BSD ISOs instead of downloading them myself.
Excellent point (Score:2)
Re:You have no right to fuck up my connection (Score:2)
UCSC does it too (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems to be common now... (Score:2)
I always love the "It's my right to have fast bandwidth at college!" arguments that turn up....
Oncampus sharing (Score:2)
What this means is we as college students have to start using oncampus sharing solutions like Direct Connect with oncampus hubs -- instead of searching national networks (fasttrack, gnutella), we can just set up college hubs like RIT students have done [collegedrinker.com]. Connecting oncampus will be orders of magnitude faster than connecting offcampus -- and nobody "shapes" those packets. The only potential problem is copyright infringement crackdown when the networks get popular enough - but as long as people don't share copyrighted music/movies, they're in the clear. Of course there's always FTP and IRC...
So Buy Your Own Connection (Score:3, Funny)
WE've been doing this for a while now!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
move off campus (Score:2, Informative)
Setup a local Lan Master Node (Score:2)
Save the bandwidth for CounterStrike. (-;
Hotline to the rescue! (Score:2)
Plus Hotline can be configure from the server end to use pretty much any port.
What else did you expect for free? (Score:2)
Food ain't free, housing ain't free, why should entertainment be free?
Now what do I do?
Get an education, that's what you're there for.
YOU CAN'T TAKE MY MUSIC AND MOVIES!!!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
The students think is is unfair and totally immoral -- but they can't understand that bandwidth isn't cheap. All in campus traffic doesn't count, so some students have set up direct connect servers -- we've had dorm rooms mrtg's showing the buildings maxing out in just local traffic alone so internet traffic coming in wont even be an option...
I think Penn State made a good choice by giving them a limit. There's no slowdown on any of the p2p, but they have to be responcible and think and moderate themselves. It's just a shame though, because there are some legitimate reasons that would put you over the 1.5 gig, but the majority of comptuers I was asked to look at were all from the lovely p2p programs.
Stop bitching and get on with life (Score:2)
Like the title says, stop bitching and get on with your life.
Nothing Unusual (Score:2, Insightful)
However, they do allow, and even encourage, the use of GnucleusLAN [gnucleus.com], which allows access on the local network. Since it is all local, we get really high transfer rates (at least 400KB/s), and it doesn't degrade network performance. Yes, the files are at least a week old (many kids get files of Kazaa when they go home for the weekend), but I've been able to get more stuff than I ever could on the outside.
You have to remember that P2P software is very inefficient with bandwidth. As this [globetechnology.com] article shows, P2P programs can generate as much as 150KB/s of downstream traffic even when you aren't downloading stuff.
So, in conclusion, stop whining (and good luck finding any other college which allows unrestricted P2P access). Just be lucky that you have any access to internet P2P -- most college students don't anymore.
Can someone tell me why this is news?
Why can't this be solved financially? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that with cable modems and DSL typically only costing $40-50 per month - it's not that big of a deal to give each interested student their own such connection, and roll the cost into their tuition.
Leave the University T1 or T3 for internal use only (faculty and actual classrooms), and of course, leave some sort of ftp type file service active - so students can submit legal files to it if they need to distribute something (like an open-source program they wrote themselves?).
Any student who would whine and complain about this arangement is probably just hoping to run a high-speed server without ponying up the cash for the bandwidth - and that's not what college is all about.
Why haven't major ISPs done this? (Score:2)
I can understand why some colleges have seen the need to limit their Internet bandwidth usage. But the question I have is why haven't the more traditional ISPs done the same. The only organizations I know of selectively reducing bandwidth by protocol are colleges, schools, and univeristies. Earthlink, Comcast, etc. have not done the same.
Some people I know of download all night on their modems. But given a single phone line, I would think most dial-up users would not.
Some Cable/DSL ISPs also do port blocking, but this just results in a game of cat & mouse. Selective slowdowns likely are a no-no since many of their customers purchase such connections for online gaming (which maps ports all over the place).
Most co-location centers proudly boast about how they use less than 50% of their available bandwidth, so I speculate that backbone carriers have at least half that amount. While that sounds like everyone on the high end tossing money away, it makes me wonder why the other parties do not do the same in order to lower overall prices and make everyone happy in the long run.
University of California Bandwidth Layout (Score:2, Informative)
The main project page for the backbone system used in the UC system can be found at http://www.calren2.net
Here, there is also a layout of the connections between the different Universities http://www.ucop.edu/irc/projects/CRGN/
I currently go to UC Davis and was under the impression that we pretty much have an OC-12 (622mbit/sec) at our disposal, certainly the bandwidth I have been able to pull down even after the freshmen moved in last week seemed to confirm this. It's 8pm on Sunday and I'm getting 70-150k/sec, and during most hours of the day I have still been able to hit upwards of 700k/sec from sites like apple.com
Anyone who works with networks able to explain from the above links if my assumption about our bandwidth is incorrect?
UC Davis does not appear to use any sort of traffic shaping that I have noticed. The very few times I have used Kazaa I have been able to pull down up to 200k from good sources.
Better solution. (Score:2)
I mean, if your campus is so popular with the downloaders...
Truman does it too (Score:2)
There's quite a bit of good stuff on the internal network though, and thanks to ShareScan [sharescan.net], it's easy to get. Also, learn to use IRC. At least at my school, the standard IRC ports aren't blocked or throttled, so you can get everything you need at great speeds, if you know what you are doing.
Just remember -- it is their network (Score:2)
Or, even better -- complain with your feet and dollars. Go to a different school.
why P2P on campus? (Score:2)
(-1, Redundant); (-1, Disinteresting) - whatever.
From the guidelines... (Score:2, Funny)
Uhm, 5-10 megabits per second seems pretty fair to me... it's faster than both DSL and cable modem. The part where they say it'll save the school and students literally thousands of dollars seems fair as well. Do you really need those fake nude Britney Spears mpegs that bad? =)
QoS Appliances Considered Harmful (Score:2)
Schools need to control commodity network use (the per-bit charges of commodity providers aren't passed on to the users). QoS appliances are just a wrong way to do it.
To those who believe they are entitled to unlimited transfers from resnet because they {pay tuition|pay monthly connection fee|have a legitimate reason}: do you also think you're entitled to print 10000 pages per month on the department printer? If not, what do you think is the difference from using disproportionate share of network resources?
Commodity transfers aren't free or even cheap. The commodity ISP charges your university transit fees based on the amount of stuff that is transferred. If you're willing to let the school pass those fees down to you, it is reasonable to ask your school to let you use as much as you want. (Good LAN connectivity is a one-time expense and therefore in-campus transit is a non-issue.)
Conflicting statements (Score:2)
Network File sharing (Score:2)
The Correct Solution! (Score:2)
All I can say is, "Wow!" At my school, when Napster was hitting its prime, our IT department just flat-out blocked Napster ports, declaring an "emergency" procedure to protect our bandwidth [byu.edu].
Some students had some interesting [byu.edu] opinions [byu.edu] on the whole matter.
It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports [byu.edu]. Then they moved us all behind a NAT firewall (without any advance notice) which left us from being able to connect to our machines from off campus. This provoked this student opinion letter [byu.edu] from yours truly. :-)
In my opinion, the actions of our IT deparment have been largely totalitarian and insensitive to the issues at hand. If any institution should be the champion of enabling students to exercise democratic and free exchange of information, a university certainly should! Hopefully they (and many other schools) will seriously consider UC Irvine's approach to the problem.
Do what we used to do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go on, it'll do you some good. Get off your fat, geek asses. Make some friends, interact for real, and actually SHARE some music.
Example of UCI's problem... (Score:2)
From the article... (Score:2)
Download the source for gnutella. Roll your own gnutella net for just UC Irvine IP's. Distribute among the student populace. (perhaps make your website on your "students" webserver, or whatever your analogue is, a hq for said application) Watch as you get blazing download speeds from all your friends, you are regarded as a campus hero among students and administrators are happy because they are saving on external bandwidth costs. Oh, and you'll get laid a lot.
We are looking at the same thing at U of A (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think it's a really good solution, I don't think banning P2P outright is good since it DOES have legitimate uses and people will always work around a ban in some way or another BUT it can be a real strain at times.
The priority feature the Packeteers offers is great because if it works as advertised (and it seems to) you don't have to be a jerk and set any real hard limits on anything, you can just set up a prioity scale so that the important stuff always gets what it needs.
Re:Try going to the record store? think again (Score:2)
When I was in Europe I did spent a fair amount of money at festivals. Good albums were about 13 EU. A much better deal and much less frustrating.
So, I'll still keep to using P2P and buy stuff when I can.
Re:Wasted opportunity (Score:2)
Re:Wasted opportunity (Score:2)
The Phoenix Landing has techno on Wednesday nights and drum n bass on Thursdays.
Saturday nights at the Cellar TWO BLOCKS from Harvard is free techno, but that's 21+
You can look up stuff on boston.citysearch.com, as well. If you're into electronic stuff, check out www.miscon.net. There's also some Boston area really dorky hip hop at http://www.donred.org (one of my everything2.com compadres!)
Re:Vulnerable to http tunneling (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You dont. (Score:2)
Re:My ISP DISCONNECTED my service for "overuse" (Score:2)
If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll let go cheap.