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Peer-to-Peer for Academia
Andy Oram has a good speech online about peer-to-peer and universities. He discusses a variety of possible research topics under the p2p umbrella and urges university administrators to promote this instead of squashing it.
For your information, here at UM, It's not discouraged. However, I've noticed a few things while here.
This year @ UM, they dropped each port down to 10mbps in the dorm rooms. They also put a cap on the lines at 5mbps
Interestingly enough, this year they have put everything behind a NAT/Proxy. This has prooved to be somewhat of a problem.
Supposedly the reason behind this move was as follows:
1. Someone set up a server and leased multiple IP's in their dorm room, and hosted porn sites. I have yet to figure out how this person got an authority on DNS, but that information we don't know.
2. Many people were setting up FTP's to serve multiple clients.
It wasn't the peertopeer programs that did it, it was those who actually took advantage of our non locked down network. It was nice then, those who knew the possibilities, could use it as they felt necessary, while not taking advantage of it. But, they decided to take advantage of the system and flood the line with unnecessary bandwidth. Thus ruining it for all of us.
Thus, everything was put behind a proxy/NAT. Now, the connection in the dorms *suck* because they aren't doing it properly. I'm loosing like 30-50% of all packets sent out, within the campus network. Their servers pipe'ing all the traffic must be bogged down here at the U.
I did notice however (when performance wasn't varying from 0kbps to 3mbps, mostly towards the lower end..) that in the beginning of the year ports that Napster, and other programs use were blocked, and that wasn't too nice. I wound up using my own Proxy on one of my servers, off site.
The point is, that I think they won't be banning these things all together, but many providers will be implimenting strategies to imply discouragement of these services. IE. The implimentation of QoS and limiting everyone. Or, you will see more active flaging of people who use lots of bandwidth quite frequently.
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
Gotta love that moderation system. Just how the hell did that get modded as troll?!?
/. by the balls and unlimited mod points at times.
OTOH Thank you to those who pointed out my silly pop science reference to the "10% of our brains" thing, I'm obviously only using 10% of mine for bothering to post here at all. I swear it seems like some kiddie has
NOW you can mod me down you slimey fuck.