Working With The Bandwidth Problem?

macdaddy asks: "Being a Network Admin in a small university, I have to fight the Napster issue every day. I don't want to ban it but we only have 1 T1 and it maxes out around 10AM when the dormites wake up, and finally teeters off around 4AM when they go to bed. That really hinders legitimate use. My question, how does a Netadmin work with Napster and its users to keep from blocking it while still being able to use out lowly T1 for other purposes? What options are there? Proxies? Firewalls? Traffic shapers?" This problem is not just about Napster. There will be other services that, due to their popularity, will stress your network's bandwidth to the limit. It seems to me that establishing network controls would be more fair than completely filtering out the entire service, so what's the best way to implement them?

Comments

Dealing with high traffic

[Koos]

Sounds familiair, and what you don't want to get into as a network admin at an educational institution is the 'us against them' situation. Both sides lose, and both sides end up feeling bad. You for having a lousy job with lousy students making your work impossible, the students for the Internet connection being 'unusable'.

There are a number of possible solutions, and I'll mention some possible solutions.

• Firewalling napster ports. This is just the start of an arms race. You block one port, clients move to another port, repeat until bored.
• Using proxies and nothing can be done without using such a proxy. Not an ideal situation and you make any server a student wants to run inaccessible where such a server could be very usefull and nice (hey, slashdot started on a student account :)
• Traffic measurements per IP. Using IP accounting you can find out quite fast who abuses the network. Set a policy in advance (no 'fair use' blabla, a 'more then 768 megabytes Internet traffic in one week and your connection is dead' or whatever number works best). Have that policy be accepted as school policy by the people in charge. It's not your rule (those pesky network admins at it again), it's the school rule for using the school's resources.
• Traffic shaping. Allocate an amount of bandwidth to the dorms, maybe allocate a larger amount after hours. Maybe allocate bandwidth per IP. (Can perfectly be combined with the previous one).

Remember one thing and don't be afraid to repeat it : The school is not an ISP and is therefore not obliged to give its student Internet access. Internet access is an aide to your studies. If you need more Internet access then that, get your own access and be prepared to pay for it.

Succes, and good luck, and I hope you find a way to keep your student network users as friends so you can do your work a lot easier.

traffic inside instead of outside

[RGRistroph]

One thing that I've wondered about these napster bandwidth issues -- is it possible to direct traffic within your network instead of through the internet ?

The napster users should be on your side for this, as it would be faster for them also. Of course, they may be able to saturate that network also.

Could you hold a dorm meeting and convince everyone to get a napster user name with the same prefix or suffix, and prefer those names when selecting who to download from. It would be kind of like a distributed web proxy cache for the music -- check first to see if someone already pulled it through the T1, and if not, get it from the internet but make it available from your machine so it doesn't have to come through again.

Would gnutella do this automatically ? Could you get some dorm techie in each dorm to set up his machine in the manner of www.gnute.com, so that those people without systems that have a gnutella client could connect to it ? The napster and gnutella clients I have used on linux don't seem to allow uploads from my machine; this was a while ago, but of course you would need clients that worked in both directions for everybody.

Re:traffic inside instead of outside

[davidu]

some students run local napster servers. It saves an awesome amount of bandwidth, plus transfers go about 1000k/s [not 100, 1000] (nearly instantaneous for mp3s.)

Washington Univeristy in St. Louis has one at Phreedom.Net/wustl .

Lehigh also has one. (no URL)

-Davidu

limit traffic used by napster

[po_boy]

There are devices (the one I'm thinking of is made by visual networks) which limit the amount of traffic used per protocol, IP block, and vary with time of day. That means that you can say you want to allocate 10% of your traffic to FTP, 20% to napster, 10% for the administrative office IP space, and let the rest be distributed as needed. These examples are just that; you can divide up the traffic in a variety of useful ways.

The visual networks device, I believe is a CSU/DSU, router, and this filtering logic all in one. It's got pretty good remote management features as well.