The Real Story here at UWYO (Score 5, Interesting)

Wow.. UW on the Slashdot front page... Amazing. Unfortunately the article hardly says anything, so as a former IT employee and currently part of the staff that deals with all things related to student networking in the dorms, I'd like to try and fill in the details: Unfortunately, Laramie is NOT a large town (26k counting students) and the bandwidth coming in is very limited. The University only has a 30 Mbit upload capacity coming through Cheyenne, which (limitedly) comes from the huge hub in Denver, CO and (so we've been told) "there isn't enough capacity going into Cheyenne for us to purchase more". Up until a year and a half ago there weren't any problems here with bandwidth. Then all of a sudden everyone is using P2P in the dorms and leaving outside sharing on. It wasn't a problem of people downloading with P2P, it was the rest of the world downloading from us. There was so much traffic going out of the dorms that the entire university network was slowed to a crawl. Their solution at first was to just limit the dorm traffic to 10Mb which fixed the problem for the rest of the university but made it impossible for me to even read slashdot from my room. Naturally that was still a problem, as even legit HTTP traffic couldn't get through. They've been messing with packeteer for a long time but can't come up with a good solution. Right now HTTP packets have highest priority, followed by FTP (which wasn't allowed any priority at first until a lot of students complained) and just about anything else is like squeezing the entire population of China through a single revolving door. Speaking of telnet.. I can't telnet to anything off campus from my room unless I want to WATCH the packets arrive every 10 seconds or so. P2P traffic is about 20 times slower than a modem (but everyone still uses it.. as I sit here writing on my ex's computer next to her latest list of mp3s to download). So how do the geeks here survive? A lot of people are running local FTP servers, which is all I use any more. We can't play networked games off campus, so we have set up our own servers. But even that didn't work- Games like counterstrike which needed outside authentication would time out after 60 seconds. We managed to fix that problem with http tunnel. Almost anything can still be tunneled out and is unaffected by the packet shapers, provided you can find a good, reliable proxy on the outside. As far as getting busted for file sharing, we have shut off quite a few ports because of letters from the RIAA/MPAA, but for the first offense the students are only required to give us verbal confirmation that all of the illegal material has been removed before we enable their ports again. After that the ports to their rooms are shut off for the rest of the semester. Oh, and as far as an agreement? I sure don't remember signing anything related to the network usage. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with them snooping the files going through to help increase the legit bandwidth, as long as they aren't trying to crack through encryption and they don't snoop local traffic. I also think they should look into local file servers... you'd be amazed at what you CAN'T find on a 320 Gb ftp server filled by students... I never have to get anything from off campus anymore, unless its the latest source code for my Gentoo box (wget through HTTP works beautifully). At least the article picked the right person to interview as Brad is one of the few people over in the IT department with a clue. Sorry, couldn't let the article make our IT department look like they really know what they are doing. Really they are just being guinea pigs for this new software that the article is hyping up. IT is, however, doing a good job of walking the fine line on illegal P2P sharing. As Brad stated, they have a somewhat "don't know, don't care" policy while at the same time acting as MPAA/RIAA whores upon request (which I think is what this software is really for). Anyway, hope I could clear up a few things for you from someone who has been quite involved with all of this. Post questions, I'll be happy to answer. --An Anonymous Coward, even though most people from UW already know who I am now-- And uh.. mod this up/link it to the article