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Yep, a bunch of colleges have these kinds of things. Here at gatech, we have buzzsearch, which is a dual smb/ftp searcher crawler, and is also opensource. It has worked great in avelliating traffic (which was horrible last spring). Of course, most of the problems were solved when the whole network was upgraded earlier this term. Our resnet folks have pretty much turned a blind eye towards p2p since the network was upgraded; I suppose they don't care about bandwidth costs much, only congestion.

The only limit they put so far is a ~52 kb/s limit for outgoing traffic to the internet. Incoming (downloading) from the internet and internal networks is pretty nice though. It's always nice to get 700kb/s-1.2mb/s, which I haven't been able to get in many years before the rise of p2p.

I would just sign the agreement if I were you (although I have no idea what the punishment is going to be if you do). If your network admins aren't bright enough to see what you were doing was a non-intrusive search, you're not going to be able to sweet-talk them into believing you're not "hacking" people's computers.

I wrote/administer the aformentioned search engine, Buzzsearch, at Georgia Tech. I've never had a problem with the network staff - I do everything I can to be a good campus netizen (blocking off campus searching, for example) and they don't acknowledge that I exist. But I'm definitely not doing this for my "ideals", or to "fuck the man", yadda yadda... I sure as hell wouldn't risk my degree for Buzzsearch - if OIT came knocking on my door I'd hand over my server in a second flat.

You're in a bad environment with uncool admins... deal with it and give up. It's not worth possibly fucking up your education.

We've actually been keeping our bandwidth down at Georgia Tech via a neat little student-run/built Samba crawler, know as BuzzSearch.

We also limit outbound connections to 50k/s.

These things combined means a lot more people are using our "free", internal bandwidth to download, rather than saturating our Internet line. Pings are WAY down from last year, and transfer speeds to legitimate things are up. It's amazing how people act when you show them the wonders of stuff on campus (about 3TB and counting :D )

Exactly, internal networks are the way to go. In my school (gatech, atlanta, GA), a nice webbased smb/ftp auto-indexing/finding service was created called buzzsearch. Good things that internal networks are so much faster than Kazaa is over ADSL back home.

Our system is available under the GPL, so other schools can implement it. I know other schools have developed free things like this too, so look around. Our's is in perl.

what is ironic about this is my school, Georgia Tech, has a student run file share crawler called BuzzSearch (it even has a sourceforge page ;)

I mean, with 3TB of stuff to play with connected at about 6MB/s on average, who needs Kazza? :D

in my school (georgia tech), we just use something called buzzsearch, it's a webbased windows shares/samba scanning/indexing/searching service. The source for it is available on sourceforge, so people at other schools can start their own services. So far, all p2p networks are allowed, including kazaa, imesh, gnutella, etc..