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UC Irvine Cracks Down on P2P
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.
That's what you can do.
Sucks that the college is using it's bandwith for education, eh?
They're allowing your to pirate music, movies, and software. Most schools block all P2P programs and that's the end of the story. What could you possiblye be complaining about?
Is your browser retarded?
like in, the first post past the first post. --stranegloop
please learn to spell and die. thanks.
That's what you have to do now. It's For Your Own Good (tm).
.....Girls maybe(its not like u would be downloading anything other then porn)
I'm a geek deal wit it
I'm a freshman at Harvard, and have been experiencing slow downloads over Kazaa also. I'm consistently getting slower downloads here than at home with my Comcast cable connection. Does anyone know if Harvard has a similar system in place? -Adam
Because P2P was hogging the bandwidth, the administrators decided to lower the limits for such programs. It's greatly reduced from what the potential is, but I'd rather that they still allow us to use them instead of cutting us off altogether.
UC Irvine is definitely not alone in this. A number of schools are simply throttling the speed down on common P2P ports. My brother's school, Denison, does this. The student's solution is usually pretty simple though: Move to a client that uses port 80. Most of the time the speed is restricted only by port and unless they restrict web access this will get one back onto the autobahn.
Packetshaper Actual Device.
You're going to university. University towns, in general, tend to have a good selection of new and used record stores, as well as a ton of live music. Rather than stealing music via a P2P file-sharing system, why not get out and go to the stores and shows? Okay, so it's not as cheap, and you're probably not going to get Britney Spears' latest, but what you're going to find is a lot of good music on the cheap. Plus, you'll be out of your room, meeting people. That's worth the few $$ you'll spend on the music right there.
If you don't know where to start, just ask around. Find the guys on your uni's quad (or whatever they call the big open area between buildings that every campus seems to have) playing guitars or bongos or whatever. They'll be able to tell you the names and locations of a few good record stores. Then those stores will be able to point you to a few more, and all the stores will know about upcoming live shows. In the process, you meet a number of interesting people, and have some fun. Now isn't that better than sitting in your dorm room, pirating N*Sync songs at 2am?
be happy you got anything... sniveling little whiny bitch.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Now you can use your brain to find a way around a problem. Welcome to the world of education!
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
Sounds like UC Irvine is trying hard to balance the freedom of the Internet (they aren't stopping you from downloading via P2P) versus the needs of the academic campus (sorry, getting the latest rip of Brittney just isn't as important to academia as you think). Its a pretty nice solution without a moral judgement. As Michael points out, they are straightforward about it, and their arguments are cogent. Its a good solution to a real world problem.
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
University of West Florida does just this-they have a firewall that completely blocks all P2P software ports. Kazaa, gnutella, whatever, it just doesn't work. I think I have the only solution - get Timbuktu installed on my home computer, remotely download files from my cable modem and then upload to my college box. Ta-da!
Crackdown would be if they banned all P2P and punished anyone caught trying to use a Kazaa or WinMX port...
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
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
"In the past, about 2% of the residents would use over 90% of the available bandwidth causing slowdowns and poor performance for everyone." ...
...
"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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Downloads may be slow due to the fact that everyone uses kazaa, the problem is kazaa chews up the bandwidth. Hence the slow downloads.
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.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
The audacity of it!!! Who in their right mind would want to limit the theft of music?
Soory, had to rant. Anyway, it is their bandwidth. They can limit it in whatever way they see fit. Go to the record store.
about a year ago, someone had stolen a password on a system of mine and I found them in the act, connected from UCIrvine. Phone calls to campus police, the IT department, and the IT security desk (ha), were worse than fruitless. They said I was being attacked by nimda, and when I told them no, I was running linux and this was a different sort of thing, they ignored me and passed me up the chain. NOTHING came of my reports except about $10 of phone calls. UCI is now firewalled from my network. Maybe it should be firewalled from the rest of the net, as they don't know anything about security and don't want to learn.
Apparently, UCI has limited access for all P2P programs with this fine piece of hardware. Now what do I do?"
You can either get your own Internet connection, bargain with UC and offer to pay more since you want to hog tons of bandwidth, or deal with it. It is not your god-given right to run Kazaa at 1.5 Mbps, especially if the school's entire bandwidth is 2.0 Mbps. That bandwidth costs money, and if you want to hog it then be prepared to pay - a full time T1 class connection costs $600-$800/Mbit/month.
If this is really an issue for you, just move off campus and get a cablemodem. But don't expect the rest of the UC students and alumni to fund your addiction to the latest shit MP3s. Give me a break!
You're at Harvard, in lovely Boston, Mass., and you're crying about not being able to use Kazaa? Good god man! Get out and see a show! Boston is home to many, many great bands (larger ones and smaller). You are definitely missing out if you're skipping the shows in favor of Kazaa.
What a waste.
No, sunshine, it's the student's bandwidth: he's paying for it in computing fees.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Hmmm...not allowing students to pirate pornography, music, movies, & software. I would STRIKE against the school. ;)
It's not like it should be an issue--the resnet's here for academic purposes. Even though we (Northwestern) have plenty of bandwith (4 OC3s w/ every student having either shared or switched 10 or switched 100), p2p traffic was really noticable until we started packet shaping, and just imagine what it's like @ Irvine where they only have 60 Mb/s. Also, we turn it down in the evening when it's pretty much only students on the network.
Interestingly enough, this was also a weak-point when someone (unknowingly) was part of a DoS attack: it overloaded the box and shut down everyone's network connection!
Josh
Bandwidth costs. Irvine might not care whether or not you spend you nights looking for that bootleg edit of "a walk to remember" or the deleted scenes from "crossroads", they do care about that formerly phat T3. You pay for that bandwidth in tuition (As well as for the rest of the campus' utilities.)
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.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Based on the different University networks I have seen as of late, I completely understand why they implemented this. It's due to network saturation. Honestly, Faculty, Staff and Students sit there downloading multimedia of various sort using P2P filesharing programs as if their lives depended on it. As of late tell me if you don't notice that hint of latency in your network connection.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
This is not an uncommon practice. Here at URI we have a Packeteer box installed between the Residence Hall network and the edge routers. It limits bandwidth to P2P applications to 10MB/s (burstable to 20MB/s). This is on a network with 60MB/s to I1 and 65MB/s to I2.
According to the policies, HTTP traffic is given the highest priority. This probably means traffic to port 80 (and maybe port 443) of external computers.
To take advantage of this, of course, you need to use GNU Httptunnel or a similar program to route your filesharing traffic through a proxy on the outside.
To make this more clear:
This makes all your file-sharing traffic look like legitimate web traffic to the QoS device. You just have to send your data through port 80!
|/usr/games/fortune
The number 1 point there seems an encouragement to set up an in-college P2P system...
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
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
This is a very reasonable policy.
I wonder why they don't also give telnet/ssh priority, as these are also educationally important and are very latency-sensitive.
Your college took it upon themselves to limit the bandwidth of students seeking music and pr0n (and don't kid yourself, that's exactly what you were going to use it for) so that people wanting to view normal webpages could do so with some reasonable speed, while still allowing you to get your music and pr0n (slowly) and you're bitching about it? Cry me a river.
The fact that they allow p2p at all - even giving up to 10mbps for it - is good news.
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.
Sony ha
What UCI is doing is better than what my campus is doing, which is quietly nullrouting traffic to common P2P ports.
(Tongue in cheek of course) ;-P
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?!?!?!?!"
At my school, Dakota State University in Madison South Dakota, every time unusually large amounts of traffic showed up on non standard ports, the school would throttle it down with their packet shaper. This was fine and dandy until students realized this and changed the port used to the one port that no school would throttle, that's right, our good friend 80.
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
My school has been doing this for about a year now. It was necessary to eliminate the bandwidth hogs who clogged things up with their P2P apps. As a non-P2P user, I got really tired of having my web requests drag so freshmen could download the latest Britney Spears videos.
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.
This is very widespread. I am the network admin at a small college, most places I talk to have a packetshaper in place to limit bandwidth. We bought ours this summer so we could reopen the P2P networks. Boy am I regetting this. We went from totaly blocked last year to slightly above dialup speeds this year and I have never heard the end of it. Usualy showing people the graph that shows our uplink at 97% 24hrs a day stops people from complaining but not always. What most students don't understand is that bandwidth is limited, very limited, and they are not the only ones using the network. When we have an outage I don't usualy hear from students first its from faculty who cant work on their research. I do applaud them for being so upfront about the bandwidth controls, but I would be interested to hear from their Admins as to how much this has helped their network. I know from my personal experance that it has prevented our network from just grinding to a halt.
After years of dialup, one thing I was looking forward to the most about college was the fast ethernet connection.
Sorry, but tough. Just like what happened at USC, they have every damn right to do so.
Perhaps you should start looking for other positive things about universities - like, maybe, a higher education?
and so is the RIAA, it doesn't seem too wrong to explain a workaround. I've never tried it, but kazaa has the option of tunnelling through a SOCKS proxy in the Firewall tab of the settings. I assume that would bypass any filtering server. If it works, you are limited by the bandwith of the proxy. You could also consider using a different P2P client; such as overnet or giFT.
When all freedom is outlawed only the outlaws have freedom
I live in Cambridge, down the street from Harvard, and I can tell you that in spite of the abundance of used / alternative record stores I don't find much worth buying. Small stores cater more towards the Three Dog Night crowd than the stuff like Hypnoskull, Noisex, MS Gentur, P.A.L that I want to buy. When I did find a P.A.L album, finally, in Newbury Comics, I did buy it -- but that was 4 months ago and I've never seen anything else since.
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.
At McMaster U. (Hamilton, ON, CA) they use a program called ResX. Think of KaZaA (in fact, suspiciously EXACTLY like Kazaa...) except it only works on the LAN. Think DivX DVD-rips in 40 seconds, 5-meg MP3s in 3 seconds. Now that's tasty.
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 hub or something similar. Make it only avaialbe to people within the university.
Good luck!
-cruz
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Therefore, of the 60 mbs total bandwidth, 5 - 10 mbs is set aside for P2P.
Sounds perilously close to contributory copyright infringement to me.
At least you're getting some speed, at the university of stony brook (NY) they basically blocked all ports they deem unneccessary to general network usage (basically they've been tracking network usage and blocked ports used by common apps such as kazaa, winmx, any gnutella app, even 6667 got blocked, which meant for me that I had to find alternative ports to log on to IRC, thankfully 3400 is still open). My school's network policy is becoming ridiculously strict as they keep blocking new ports (i'm glad there's not a lot of people that know hotline (http://www.bigredh.com), so at least i can still use that). I know there's alternatives such as setting up a proxy outside the network, but honestly is it really worth the effort just so I could use inferior file sharing software? (Personally i'm not much of a fan of the widely used file sharing apps due to their flakyness, it takes more time to track down certain artists using ftp or hotline, but at least i know what i'm getting). Hmm, i think i lost the point to my post, either way, network restrictions in universities is becoming more common, and it's certainly annoying considering the amount of money that's being spent just to dorm, people should at least deserve a working network with decent speed.
It sounds like they limit the bandwidth for the whole school. For good reasons it seems as well. If it were a per connection or per ip basis you could kind of use a distributed setup but that would be a bit impractical. Another option you have is to buddy up with someone whose school isn't doing the same thing and convince him to setup a server and ssh into his box and d/l the files to there then transfer them over ftp. Yet another option is setting up a local p2p network. Gnucleus has an option for being behind a firewall. It'll let you run an internal p2p network. For common stuff your "friends" around the rest of the network may have what you are looking for. Then there is good old irc and news groups. Its not p2p but the selection is usually pretty good.
In Republican America phones tap you.
and poor students are ripped off froma service ones again...
Thats good UCI is very straightforward but still...
Here finland a company named ISP offers a 1mbps HomePNA based connection without anything stating of 'excess usage' when you order it, but well if you use it enough they start inspecting who is using the BW and informs that using P2P software is not allowed... Odd to offer 1mbps connection if you cannot use it, do you agree?
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
oh for fuck sake the form nazis are way out of the fucking hand here!
I had to FUCKING RETYPE THIS WHOLE FUCKING COMMENT
because it was all in fuckig caps FFS!
Sounds like your browser is broken. You should probably get it fixed.
This is great news! So many stupid universities just blocked P2P altogether. UCI smartly set things up -- important stuff gets high priority. Your neighbor doesn't have to deal with slow access to a class website because you're downloading the latest Lord of the Rings bootleg. You can still get the bootleg; it just takes longer.
:)
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.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Either universities limit P2P traffic or the internet connection gets completely saturated, at which point your P2P speeds (not to mention everything else) suck anyway.
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.
So there I am...up at 3AM trying to work on my homework, which involves doing research.
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Yeah, packetshitter can suck my butt. I went to Hillsdale College. We had nothing but problems. They just grouped all FTP/Gaming ports into one. So, our Ping would be 60 for a minute and then spike to 10,000. Oh, and it didn't stop people from transferring files. People found out AIMster wasn't "shapped" as well as a couple other programs. Oh, and it just decided to crap out every 18 hours or so. IOW, at 10pm every night it would die and then the lazy admin wouldn't make it back in until 8am. What a jerk. So, me and my suitemates shared a Cable Modem which was insanely faster. Well, that's my rant for the evening. In summary, packetshitter made it just as unpleasant for the users if not more so than the Kazaa users. Oh, and the kazaa users pay and didn't cost friggin' $10,000. BLAH!!!! Morons
packet shaper works much like the reservoir block of pipe dream, the game that amazed many of us in childhood. i have attended their *interesting* seminar in my co-op company. it buffers packets and send them collectively in bursts rather than allowing all small packets to roam in the internet where bandwidth and performance are both critical to the daily operation of a large organization which its network span across several LANs.
I go to the University of Arizona, and this year they have begun to severely limit the bandwidth alotted to the ports used by kazaa and its variants.
However, and I believe this to be a reflection of the IT department's hesistancy to impose restrications on its users, gnutella still works just great and it seems that everyone that used kazaa is simply transferring over to this instead.
As I have said before in response to related articles, I can really appreciate the bandwidth constraints that these p2p apps strain and, while looking at the issue from the perspective of a sysadmin instead of that of a user, fully agree with such decisions as these
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Fight those crazy port blockers and start a file sharing club! It can meet every Wednesday night at the library.
Hmmmmm....
University of Chinese Immigrants
Can you believe this shit? Complaining that they can't spooge Gnutella packets all over the network 24 hours a day. Meow meow.
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!@
I love a big fat pipe to the internet as much as the next guy, but is this _really_ the thing you were most looking forward to about college?
Everybody has different priorities, but what about an education, meeting new and interesting people, booze, drugs, parties, less/no parental influence, women, etc?
I didn't realize ethernet was this good... Maybe I oughta start my own street corner ethernet business just off-campus with that crack dealer I always see hanging around.
As for your "subpar" performance complaint. No details were provided but I'm guessing that you are getting better performance than that dialup you had for such a long time. If not, maybe you ought to withdraw from school, move back home, and have your parents get you a cable modem or DSL with all of that college money you won't need to spend. With all the time you'll be saving not waiting on Kazaa, I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to realize that there's a lot more to post-secondary education than just the internet connection.
So porn newsgroups are not "entertainment" traffic.
especially when claiming that they "...strive to maintain a fair and equitable use of bandwidth policy."
Here at Georgia Tech, p2p programs are a serious problem in the residential networks. What you guys don't realize is that many universities utilize the internet for the classes. When p2p programs get to the point where you can't use the internet for academic purposes, they need to stop. This was a huge problem here early in the year. The people who complain about this don't understand that it's frustrating not to be able to access course material at a decent speed.
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.
Gnucleus LAN was designed for just this contingency. You can set up a private Gnutella network on your campus and save the university the bandwidth costs of everyone using Kaaza individually. It's MUCH faster than the Java Gnutella clients *cough* Limewire *cough*. It's also the same underlying client used by Morpheus, only more up-to-date.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
geez. its now like posting their site on slashdot is going to help them out with the waste of bandwidth or anything.
"huh! new slashdot link? *click without thinking*"
I don't use P2P, but the majority of the students at my university seem to. Our connection isn't worth a damn most of the time as a result. The method used to "block" P2P is to go after users who download XMB per time period. So I get a citation for downloading 5 Linux ISOs which are legitimate downloads especially since I am a CS major, but the assholes who download MP3s, DivXs, etc on a regular basis get a free ride. So far I am one of only handfull of people I know that has been given such a citation. And yes, it is the P2P users' fault and they should lose their connections for an entire semester. If it weren't for them, the university would never have had to implement such stupid regulations.
After years of living with my parents in the suburbs, one thing I was looking forward to the most about college was the plentiful supply of crack. Upon arriving at UCI though, I found my crack access to be way below subpar. Apparently, the police have been arresting anyone who tries to sell or use crack. Now what do I do?
You could change the port that your p2p client uses. That would allow you to circumvent their packet shaper for some time. However, be warned that doing this will only start a war with the CNS (computer networking services) guys, and will end up badly.
How about, you just don't use P2P?
I'm a student at UCSC and I know that they do it here. When I lived in the dorm all my friends who used Kazaa or Morpheus experienced terrible speeds (on the order of .5 kB/s). I knew that the school limited the bandwidth almost simply by the fact that you could download a file from a corporate site at 700 kB/s.
One week in January, the limits were taken off. My friends were amazed at the speeds they were getting. Some of them went on downloading blitzes, some just kept going and thought it nice that things came faster. I however, started having serious issues just bringing up webpages. Even Google would take a few minutes to load. Every other process on the network was slowed down durring that week. Thankfully they fixed it and things went back to being nice and fast.
I was thankful for the bandwidth limits (which were port based) because it kept the rest of the network from being bogged down. With a taste of what p2p could do to a network, I knew that it really was necessary. I confess though, that I used WinMX and was able to avoid any visible restrictions when I did my downloading.
How is that? Does P2P stand for "not educational"? I was under the impression it stood for "peer to peer", which can very easily be used for educational purposes.
Peer to peer is (partly) so popular because there is no centralized server, meaning bandwidth is split from the clients. This means more bandwidth for downloaders in general. It's a shame that ISPs are putting limits on it.
I frequent the HardOCP networking forum and now that school is back someone asks almost EVERY day about this. Seems most colleges are starting to traffic shape P2P so you get .5KB/sec downloads.
I always love the "It's my right to have fast bandwidth at college!" arguments that turn up....
This sort of thing is going to spread nationwide. It's already in place at my school (Case Western Reserve University) as well - they implemented it last fall and it really helped network speed, at the cost of P2P offcampus.
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. 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...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
What do you do about it? You dont. Use the college high-speed access for education, not trading music and warez. Its their network, they have the right to restrict access to/from it as neccessary to allow proper use (according to their terms and conditions).
If you dont like it, get an off-campus apartment and cablemodem/DSL.
(Young whippersnapapers these days; when *I* was in college I was *GRATEFUL* to have a 1200/2400 baud dialup, text-only, to the VAX...) 8-)
No, wherethesundontshine, computing fees paid for by students wouldn't be sufficient to pay for the vast amount of leech traffic.
I'd like to fix your face with my fist.
You have several options for your right to steal! You can continue to use Kazaa or Gnutella: you just need to find somebody willing to proxy your connection across the internet who is willing to blow their bandwidth on your connection. Look into ssh port forwarding. Don't expect to actually find somebody more willing to do this than your university. You could find some OTHER variety of electronic theft protocol. There are several out there, far more advanced, and some even more time consuming than even the common Peer to Peer services. (Hard to believe!) But isn't gnutella fun!
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
as I see the trend now, more and more distributed storage, computing and processes are growing past client server (2 or more tier) architecture to using P2P. While I am not either an advocate or in reality do I see it a reality, the theory by some that there will be a total conversion to P2P and moving from any centralization or hierarchy... I do see the logic in using P2P to solve many problems. As this happens, will that mean that places that use either dedicated hardware or hard code their system to block certain P2P elements will become rather expensive to undo? I mean, how many ports can you block until you require very expensive traffic analyzers that will analyze WHAT the traffic is based on patterns of use over time and learning? Ahhh, I am just rambling... I however would like to remember this time 20 years from now and say... Hmmm I was right! or Damn I was offbase!
"Hypnoskull, Noisex, MS Gentur, P.A.L that I want to buy. "
Who cares. Those groups are so boring and predictable.
But i guess in college, you want to be different. You want to be hip. So you listen to the same crap as everybody else.
Christ. You probably think of yourself as a bohemian anarchist. Let me tell you how this looks to someone on the other side of 30. It makes you look cute in a "he's young and think's he's a rebel" kind of way.
We all smile at you behind your back and you make us think of ourselves when we were in college. But frankly, someone who has lived with his parents and then goes off to school being payed for by grants, loans that you don't understand, and mommy and daddy's good will shouldn't be pissed off you should say "Mommy, daddy, thanks for treating me like the little prince. I love you".
instead you think your parents are to blame for something.
You're so cute like this.
What? Whoops, sorry, I slipped into bitter. Sorry. Carry on. You seem to bohemian to me, I think you're cute.
I am a sophmore at the University of Rhode island and I work for the department of networking and telecom services, we have a Packeteer packetshaper, had it for a while. We have a nice little setup here for a state University, 60megs from verizon and soon another 60 redundent megs from cox communications.. so we will have admin on one and students on the other. But our ratelimitting is: P2P Inbound 10megs 20 burstable Outbound: 5megs no burst.. no one needs to fill our pipe sending files to leechers outside our network so.. we let kids get whatever they want, but we dont let them fill our whole 60 meg pipe ya know.. Nick D
Home Sweet Home Linux
I liked college so much, I stayed for six years. Let me give you a piece of advice, move off campus. You will have a much better time; you can do anything you want without having an RA nag at you. Its much easier to bring back girls to your apartment rather than a cramped dorm room with your roommate sleeping 5 ft away, plus you can get a cable modem without any bullshit restriction or TOS if you're in the right area.
and many people get annoyed at it, but look at it this way: you're taking an online course, living on campus. every time you try to access your class, the network is flooded with puds dling pr0n and music, and you're left with a "cannot load page" message. SUWG does it, along with countless campuses around the country, and many people got annoyed (even one of the guys on the newspaper) but i'm all for it.
If good things come to those who wait...why work now? Procrastinate!
Much to their chagrin, the next P2P file sharing applications will tunnel themselves within HTTP and SMTP. Soon, their firewalls and packet shapers will need to do full packet inspection in order to figure out what to block.
Grab Share Scan. It's a nifty little SMB share scanner (as the name implies). I found a decent amount of stuff shared just on the LAN in my apartment complex, so if you're on campus somewhere, you're bound to find a lot.
from the myBandwidth page:
my college blocks all p2p programs and the bandwith blows....
I work at a College in South Carolina and we have been doing for over two years. I think its a good thing. You don't go to college to download freaking movies and mp3z. P2P hogs up too much of the bandwidth. I tell students to share with friends because most of the music they would want will be sitting on someone else's hard drive. I remember when most people didn't even know what mp3s where. I don't like it now that any asshole and his brother can get online and download 700mb movies and hog all the bandwidth.
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
Gnucleus allows you to have a gnutella master on a lan. I think its extermely cool they allow you to still use P2P. But a large place like a college should use local nodes, why waste bandwidth?
Save the bandwidth for CounterStrike. (-;
At least your college is honest about it. I attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and have found they do the exact same thing. There's a program out there called Direct Connect that still works for me, and if it doesn't work for you, there's still the old school methods of IRC and FTPs. On the other hand, if you have a legitimate use for the bandwidth, I've found most colleges are willing to bend.
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
At the University I work at, the school pays money for our nonacademic links...both lines and for traffic. A lot of money. The state budget is a mess, tuitions are rising.
P2P peaked at something like 30% of our commercial traffic last year and it would have been higher this year.
So this would mean an extra very highend router, extra traffic costs and an extra line at the local GigaPOP just for P2P. (Good news for the suffering telcom industry at least).
Remember, it's not just the content, it's the queries queries queries that put the load on.
There was no set policy on music downloading and the like, instead the network administrator just turned off student network connections when he thought they got too high - this did not apply to faculty or staff. It did make at least one student very cranky when he tried to download a linux distribution.
Connect to Kazaa thru one of the many available free web proxy's out there or use socks2http.
Or search the newsgroups - like so...
C'mon - its just a traffic shaper! BFD
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
One of my friends decided to go a different route and is sharing the cost of Roadrunner cable with his 3 suitemates - which costs slightly more than signing up for a ResNet account but he says the speed increase (100kbps avg vs. 700kbps avg) is definately worth it.
Moral of the story: check out the options - because usually there are better ones than the University throws at you :)
My univeristy has put a block on bandwidth allowed to a particular port (each dorm room connection). After you hit about 100meg/day external speed, your bandwidth was drastically limited until 2am the next day (some sort of server reset). My way around worked quite well. Professors, particularly those doing research, are exempt from this bandwidth limit. As a web developer for one of the professor's research projects, I setup a proxy server on the server he purchased for research. Since my computer had no external connection, I could Kazaa with impunity
This is exactly why Internet2 is so badly needed. Prioritize packets based on importance. mp3 sharing shit will go to the bottom of the list, while the more legitimate educational things like ssh sessions and video conferencing will take greater priority.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Now what do I do?
Well, at least in my opinion, the first thing you should do is recognise that UCI is doing the second best thing they could possibly do in this situation. The only better option would be to give p2p third priority after web traffic (first) and general traffic (second) but not restrict it to a max of 10mbps (out of 60) no matter what else is going on. Congratulate them for being honest and openly allowing p2p to boot.
What can you do?
Well, from a networking point of view, not much. The UC controls your connection and can throttle it as much as they want. Currently, your system sorts traffic into three categories:
Favored (packets get priority): HTTP for web access
Neutral (packes are routed as usual): General traffic, e.g. games, ftp, telnet, etc...
Unfavored (packets are throttled regardless of available bandwidth): p2p
If your goal is to speed up file transfers, your only easy and immediate option is to start trading ftp logins with others, as ftp traffic falls into the second (mostly unrestricted) category, or use some other File Transfer Protocol. There is another solution to the throttling/snooping problem that would prevent ISPs and universities from being able to single out p2p traffic, but it would require reworking the protocol used by the p2p network of your choice. As it happens, I just posted more info on this exact topic earlier today in another story. You may find some of it informative if you're interested in the future/development of p2p.
What should you do?
Well, it's obvious that UCI cares more about bandwidth than legal threats from the abusive and overbearing ??AA. Try starting up a LAN-only file sharing network. You won't be subject to any throtling, the speeds will be _much_ better than downloading off of some ADSL user with 128kbps of upstream bandwidth, and there's a p2p client that's already written and available for download that meets your exact needs. It's also stable, fast, spy/ad/crapware-free, and GPL'd to boot. In case you're struck with a craving to learn more, you can find the program author's site here.
Happy trading.
It would appear that Hotline is not one of the protocols this Packeteer device is designed to work with.
Plus Hotline can be configure from the server end to use pretty much any port.
I was looking forward to the faster internet connection when I came to college too. Unfortunately, when I got there I was severely disappointed to find out that the internet, not just a part of it, is subpar. I mean subpar compared to the dialup connection, whose bandwidth I thought I left behind a year ago. Clearly this is the result of the large amount of people overusing the bandwidth with things like P2P programs. There is a 200mb/day upload limit before you're switched to lower speeds, but from the number of people I've heard talking about running servers on this bandwidth, I think there's quite a few ways around it. My opinion is, when you're on a shared connection where bandwidth becomes an issue to others who just want to browse the web or check email (I seriously get 60% packet loss), then they should ban it. As for me, I'm actually looking forward to going home where I have 512k fixed wireless!
My School (Texas A&M University) installed a traffic shaper on the link between the residential network and the rest of the university a year ago after the entire network was becoming bogged down with all the p2p traffic. Following how slow the entire network became, I'm inclined to agree with their decision.
lol, just kidding. I couldn't resist.
1/2 my family has degrees from one the big 3 (Harvard, Princeton, or Yale). I guess I just got stuck here in Oklahoma. Although we do have the highest number of Merit Scholors for a Public University in the country (or so I'm told, incessantly). Although if I would have received a 20k/year scholorship I would have certainly gone to OU. I guess I should have been focusing on studying instead of girls and parties. Oh well, no regrets.
that alot of people are advocating using a port tunnel or somesuch to remedy the situation. Despite the fact that you shouldn't be wasting the bandwidth, you DO realise that Packeteer is a layer 7 appliance? That means that it actually checks the payload and not just the port. The only solution is to have encrypted tunneling but then again the packets will still have the same signature and they'll get blocked in the next software rev.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Youre not suffering from the "P2P abuse of others" Youre suffering from a shortsighted university policy. People are USING the internet. Thats what its there for.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
My university [Kutztown University (Pa, USA)] has done this for about a semester. Bandwith was a huge issue here before that; it was so slow that half of all web pages timed out. It was literally a 10-15 minute process to simply get to a hotmail or yahoo inbox - not to mention getting the mail. Using outlook express took 5-10 minutes to check mail. Other web sites and network programs like AIM were just as slow. The blame was placed on the p2p apps being run.
The university implemented a hardware device made by packeteer called PacketShaper which seems to be doing the trick because we've got our decently-fast connection back (I usually get about 150k downloads, slightly faster uploads but I rarely upload anything).
This is (in our case, and looks like in the article too since they mention packetShaper) a physical device that sits between the outside world and the inside world. It does slow p2p applications down - a lot.
Actually, it doesn't. I work for my schools ITS Department, and we get PLENTY of calls about "the internet being too slow". These calls range from all sorts of people, from the computer illiterate, to the tech savvy. In fact, I think it increases the amount of calls, because no where does it say that their spyware-ridden KaZaA is slower at college, than it is at home on their dial-up connection.
Get Firefox!
If they were particularly interested the should concentrate of the individual computers that are soaking up the bandwidth and deal with individuals first. The other thing that they may or may not be able to do is bandwidth throttling, limiting the amount of bandwidth each PC gets, you can provide decent access to most users but anyone with a high bandwidth application would just be SOL. There is no perfect solution just a solution that will hurt some more than others.
What a coincidence! Tomorrow I am delivering a paper on just the same topic here at UNC. We have an OC-48 connection (2.4 Gb/s) and they have limited all P2P traffic to T1 speed (that's less than 0.1%) because they found that 65% of their traffic was from these programs. The port changing technique tends to work rather well because no one checks 80. The easiest, however, is to just switch programs (they can't block 'em all) or use them at non-standard times.
brandon
I seem to recall that in the 'good old days' before P2P was even a twinkle in Shawn Fanning's mind, there was a thing called FTP. I noticed it said that FTP was given 'unlimited' bandwidth...hmm...I guess that 2% of the bandwidth users (the ones who might know how to use FTP) can still use 90% or more of the network...
Holy moly man, you got all this from his choice of music? Geez... talk about midlife-crisis suppression of envious angst.
Seriously, though, you sound like you've got a rotten kid who's pissing off YOUR goodwill.
I wonder if the packet shaper can throttle per MAC address, then you you divide by modulo 7 and allocate a weeks worth of bandwidth per MAC address. The mod 7 makes sure all the counters dont get reset on the same day. You want more data, pay for another MAC address worth...
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.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Free car?
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.
Infuriate left and right
This year at the Univ. of Guelph, they setup similar packet shaping systems for the oncampus network. Traffic going through port 80 gets highest priority, everything else is extremely limited. So, essentially no on-line games either. It makes sense, since the majority of students don't play online games and p2p is a huge drain on a large system.
The University of Western Ontario has seen the problem here also, and are now developing OWGO, which is a filesharing app for the internal network.
In any case, mp3voyeur can be used to search a windows network for goodies.
-Reid
USM completely disallows usage of file sharing programs. If caught using one, they cut your connection, and the office of community standards charges you a $25 fee.
Almost every college and university has blocked or limited P2P software from accessing the internet, simply because the bandwidth is too expensive. Here at WPI, soon after Napster became popular, internet connection speeds dropped to less than 10% of what they previously were. After blocking P2P software, bandwidth use dropped a whopping 87%. However, the do allow, and even encourage, the use of GnucleusLAN, 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 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?
When I was a freshman 2 years ago in the dorms there were NO limits at all... then coming back from winter break we noticed an upstream cap of 50kb/sec, and then downstream caps for what were the more common p2p apps. It has just been recently when UCI solidified the traffic shaping policy, included just about every p2p app on the market and publically disclosed the whole setup. You guys should also realize that the net admins _know_ that online gaming needs low latency and that is why it has 2nd priority.
-- schubert
Jeez, just be thankful you have any dedicated connection, let alone Ethernet. As a '93 UC grad, I can say with authority that most of us had 9600 modems (or slower) in college, and the only file sharing that went on was my fraternity's test file.
Go study and quit whining. The world doesn't owe you bandwidth - nor do the taxpayers of the state of California.
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.
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
what do I do?
Like the title says, stop bitching and get on with your life.
ShoutingMan.com
However, they do allow, and even encourage, the use of GnucleusLAN, 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 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?
I accidently hit submit instead of preview, and my HTML was all messed up. Please mod this one down if you must, not the second (corrected) copy.
OK, let's see your detailed analysis of bandwidth usage at a four year college relative to computing fees collected. Oh, you don't have one? Thought not.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I work at UCR Computing, but not for resnet. But I knew that we would be implementing packet shaping after last year's incident where the UC Riverside dorms went far over the expected bandwidth budget in the first full week of classes of the Fall quarter (dorm residents moved in the week before the start of classes).
I think students are overwhelmed by the new found power of fast connections. I know I was when I first went to college in '97.
The problem I see now is social. Students have the perception that they should have the right to do whatever they want with their college net connection. They don't have any idea about how bandwidth isn't unlimited and is free. One guy actually emailed me about how he can request more bandwidth because people outside the UCR network can't get fast speeds to his Counterstrike server he set up in his dorm room. What the Hell was he thinking? I can't believe he had the balls to email a campus admin for more bandwidth to run an unauthorized server in his dorm room. Like someone already posted, I told this guy that we were there to provide the best computing / networking possible for his educational career at UCR, not to provide the best net gaming.
Originally, colleges and universities had fast Internet connections because they were really the only users other than government and research labs. As the net got commercialized, everyone seemed to get used to the idea that those fast connections should stay there for *all* manner of usage by students, including arbitrarily hosting file servers.
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.
Arizona State University also employs the PacketShaper hardware unit. Not only does it slow down KaZaA, but it hits multi-player games as well, such as Quake3 and Counterstrike. Imagine having a 55ms ping for about 3 minutes or so and then skyrocketing to 999+ for 30 seconds, and then back down. That is the kind of prioritizing that PS does. Also, it doesn't do it by port, it actually analizes every packet stream. Port 80 won't cut it. The only chance you have is VPN'ing somewhere else to get your bandwidth through.
My University's residences aren't wired. People who live on campus have to actually PAY for their connection from a commercial provider. (Not that you don't see CAT5 cables running in and out of all the windows.)
This historically has had an interesting effect: It's not really an issue!
Unfortunately it's probably more due to SLOW ADMINISTRATION rather than being a wise adminstrative choice.
If a chair is thrown in a forest, and there are no witnesses, did Ballmer still do it?
well, on the upshot, port 22 should be wide open...sweet sweet lynx will save the day again.
Help! Help! I'm bein' repressed!
The PacketShaper doesn't just throttle traffic based on what TCP/UDP port it runs off of. The PacketShaper actually analyses the data in packets to determine what they are, categorizes that traffic, then allows the administrator to apply rules to that type of traffic.
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.
About a year ago, someone had stolen a password on a system of mine...
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."
I wonder how they feel about the bandwidth eaten up by a good old fashioned slashdotting.
I know someone who is going to UCI at the moment, and I'm positive that she would appreciate this. I know I would. The thing is, they're right in reserving the most bandwith for things like normal internet access and Counterstrike. ;) Yeah, I use P2P programs myself, but I would definitely not be a happy camper if my /. and e-mail were being delayed by some bastard in the next room trying to download something stupid.
Yes, I think it'd be great if you had access to the great download speeds that you would expect, but at least they were forward about it.
Allowing the use of a P2P application, such as Kazaa, can DESTROY the network's bandwidth. I've seen this way too often. Imagine what would happen if everyone was trying to download files and share them at the same time?
I feel they are doing the best that they can since they are not only taking care of themselves, but also looking out for you in a sense. The Internet is a WONDERFUL tool for your education, and this makes sure that all students have good access.
Just my two cents...
Very clever, fucktard. Your intellect is astounding.
At my college they use the same methods to limit P2P file sharing with exactly the same effects of getting connection speeds that are slower than a 14.4Kbps connection. I normally wouldnt complain about this because they do have the right to do that as our ISP, unfortunately they use the same device/program to limit gaming packets!!! Thats right the thing I was looking forward to was finally having a decent ping in Tribes2 and now I get a ping of over 1000 in game. Those bastards!
Sir Timbly of Cannatuna, offical Knight of the Heptagonal Table
I have a feeling you've never visited UC Irvine.
Talking about bandwidth is considered wild partying there.
Now what do I do?
Stop breaking the law, asshole!!
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
Ah, so that's how wars start.
Do you need an oil stone for that axe? I do a good line in oil stones and grinding wheels.
At the University of Toronto, which I just left, they allow no access to P2P programs during weekdays excpet for a midnight to 6 a.m. window, but downloading is fine on weekends (as long as you don't cap out). My college was the last on campus to limit usage (because, I suspect, we were the last to get added to the hi-speed backbone and somebody felt they owed us) and it was great fun to see familiar i.p.'s on the monthly top usage list. Number 1, the library; number 2, my buddy Frank down the hall; Number 3, my buddy Josh down the other way; Number 4, me!
This kind of thing can work, but only if your school's IT department doesn't suck ass. Case in point: Illinois Wesleyan University (my alma mater). They did admit to having one (they called it a traffic shaper), but the damned thing caused an excessive amount of dropped or mangled packets. Worse yet, they would often make changes to the "traffic shaper" and then not admit to doing so- like just turning off the "other traffic" category- everything except www, email, and most IM clients. Of course, without shaping the traffic we would have had no bandwidth at all instead of a quasi-pseudofunctional connection.
The moral of the story? Like most anything else that the fools at IT got thier hands on, the only thing they managed to do well with any reliaility is show their ineptitude.
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.
actually, kazaalite 2.0 has made me not use tunneling anymore (i'm on the exclusive kazaalite2.0 list, thats right) but if you cant wait, visit http-tunnel and download their software. its like a pretend proxy server (well, its real... but read up.) If they don't limit your port 80 bandwith, you're golden.
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
As others may have already posted, UC Irvine is not the only University to do this. I attend the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, yes, the one that 'invented' the web browser and the www), and last year they started a policy of 3mb combined bandwith on all file sharing programs (at the time, Kazaa, Morpheus and *tella). 3mb/s across 10,000 people that lived in places served by the UIUC network (compared to the roughly 60mb/s pipe that they had access to) is VERY slow, even if only 1/10 of them are filesharing. And this is not in any particular direction. Upstream and downstream are shared in that 3mb/s cap.
This year they have expaned the ports covered to include WinMX and newer p2p clients (though there are a few extremely new ones out that get through), and I believe they still have the same 3mb/s cap.
you are a big sissy if you cannot hack it. they did this at mit and we hacked it long ago. you are living in history kiddo !!!
What could you possiblye be complaining about?
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)
As a graduate student here, I appreciate what they do. There was nothing as aggravating as finding your "high speed" access slowed to a crawl by everyone else downloading movies, music and games (ok, so that's what I was downloading too...)
Now that I actually need that high speed acess to do things like transfer experimental data halfway across the world, it's nice that it's there and available. The connection would suck just as much for P2P if they didn't do that because a lot more people would be moving files around.
You get the internet access for free just for living on campus (if you disagree, try getting an apartment off campus...) be happy with what you have.
We have a similar system at Arizona State University, except all non-educational traffic is grouped together. The result is that it is impossible to play online games. Most of us are willing to understand the limiting of P2P programs, because we understand that they use up alot of bandwitdh, and that for the most part they are illegal. But, online games are not illegal, and they don't use much bandwidth. So the people at UC Irvine should feel lucky that games aren't grouped in with P2P by their IT department.
In my experience on campus, there was always a UNIX machine somewhere that you could happily launder (route) all your traffic through to avoid charges. I compiled an IRC proxy on the EE Solaris server and didn't pay even a cent for my Dreamcast games as a result.
To get around the bandwidth restriction, route traffic through CS or similar, since:
" 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."
Thus, you will not be throttled if the shaper believes that the data is coming from a local machine. This is of course assuming that the shaper sits between the Residential and College networks (which in this case, it does).
Look, I got all three degrees from UCI, and I've tought there as well. Forget worrying about what songs you will or won't be able to pirate.
GO STUDY! You're going to need it.
UCSB has been doing this for 2 years now. maybe longer.
I was under the impression that all UC campuses had more bandwidth than this.
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.
UCI = University of Civics and Integras
Install a cache server for the "entertainment" traffic and connect it to the nearest backbone.
I mean, if your campus is so popular with the downloaders...
At my fine institution they have instituted something similar. Common P2P ports bound for the internet (not the campus network) have their priority throttled down during peak periods, on the basis that it probably isn't for academic use. Also similar to UCI, they don't modify the contents of the packets.
I think the school should first be clear about whether or not the bandwidth is something purchased as one rents a cable modem connection (where consumers haven't put up with this sort of tactic).
If the school is 'renting' the bandwidth to students, let them do whatever they damn well please until they have a court order otherwise.
If they aren't renting it as a supplier/consumer agreement, then they should be upfront about *that*. I think alot more students would demand more rights over the bandwidth their tuition pays for if its out in the open that they can't do as they wish with it.
Here at Truman State they throttle all p2p ports down to about 10% of the total bandwidth(not sure of the total though). There are so many damn many people using it thought that any one person only gets about .5K/sec. I don't mind though. Everything else is fast.
There's quite a bit of good stuff on the internal network though, and thanks to ShareScan, 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.
Hey, I just graduated from there in May. It was sweet ass the two years in the dorms before the packet shaper. I'm glad I moved off campus my third year and got cable :), before packet shaping and tracking of users. Its not just slow in the dorms, its slow everywhere, and I highly doubt Computing Services will change it.
I went up to UCI for a Model United Nations trip, and brought the iBook. I found an unprotected 802.11b network, and downloaded as much porn as I possibly could off a guy on IRC.
Until the security guard lady came up and asked what I was doing. =/
Damn my 56k.
Does this mean that you can tell what web sites I visit and read my e-mail?
NO![...]
Which of course is not true.
Or, even better -- complain with your feet and dollars. Go to a different school.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
First off, this is *not* a crackdown.
This is good policy, plain and simple. What they had before was stupid: blocking certain ports. I am glad they changed that.
Second, if you are living in UCI resident housing, you can probably get a cable modem. Go and use that to download pirated music, and keep the UCI bandwidth for the people who do useful stuff with it.
Third, start to think. That's what college is about. Somebody has to pay for all the bandwidth. Part of that comes out of your tuition.
porn companies and shady businesses discovered the joy of banners, and threw up bogus sites just to have people click on their website and make $.0000003 everytime someone visited.
most of the remaining sites that didn't fade into obscurity decided to disallow public downloads entirely. Nothing's more frustrating than seeing some file you need, only to get a "You are not allowed to download" error message. Messaging the admins usually doesn't help either, since there's a pretty prevalent "fuck you" attitude amongst them.
That being said, I still think hotline's a great tool, and I still check it out once in a while. As far as for people bitching about bandwidth throttling and what-not, all I can say is learn to deal with it. My old college decided to throw PacketShapers up a while back (almost 4 years now, I believe), and they didn't have the curteosy to inform the students. Out of nowhere ICQ, IRC, and pretty much everything else not port 80 was blocked, and it took me a LONG time to get an answer from the IT department (if anyone here is an admin at St. Olaf, fuck you). Move off campus and get a cable modem. That's what I did, and I have no complaints.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
One friday I come home from work to find out that my Internet service is disconnected. I went the whole weekend without it, and on Monday I call to find out that I had been disconnected for using TOO MUCH BANDWIDTH.
That was simply unacceptable to me - I needed my Internet connection for work and ended up driving into the office on Sunday because of this.
Yes I did leave Kazaa on during the day on Friday downloading 6 movies and uploading about 10. But what the hell? Immediately after getting off the phone with this ISP I called Pac Bell and ordered DSL from them instead. So I'm paying $50/month, and the upstream is only 128kbs. But I wont get disconnected at their discression unless I don't pay my bill.
-CySurflex
(-1, Redundant); (-1, Disinteresting) - whatever.
sic transit gloria mundi
Someone might have mentionned this, but I'm lazy. This happened at my university. They slowed down traffic on all ports except 80 to a crawl. Then I discovered a nifty little program called Http-Tunnel. It acts as a proxy server that routes your traffic through port 80, through their server and out to the internet. If you want good speed, I would recommend paying the 4.99 for a month...definitely worth it.
I saw the Sign, and it opened up my eyes
That's what someone did at the University of Western Ontario (UWO, sorry, can't find the link). You don't eat into your bandwidth cap, all that unused network bandwidth is put into good use, and it's usually wicked fast (like 500Kps).
Of course, new material has to be brought into the intranet, but then at least there wouldn't be a heavy amount of redundancy of DLing pr0n.mpg 100x. But I'm sure a few people will be the source of all "good things" that are available on a P2P network.
At a certain unnamed school I attended, I worked for the ResNet folks. We had the same problems as everyone else, too much P2P file sharing. We didn't really want to put caps anywhere, but the traffic volumes were just too great not to.
We ended up creating two completely separate bandwidth pools - one for normal bandwidth users, and one for high bandwidth users. If you "abused" your bandwidth (something like >5 gigs/day) you got put in the second "penalty" pool, and had to fight it out with all the other P2P folks. This left the vast majority of the people happy as clams and the real bandwidth hogs to doing only minimal trading and not hosting the East Coast's most popular FTP server (which we had at one point).
It's a relatively simple solution to make up with some decent routers and such - I highly recommend it.
Peer to Peer (P2P) is given a lowert priority, and is limited to 5mbs, and can use up to 10mbs if the bandwidth is available. Therefore, of the 60 mbs total bandwidth, 5 - 10 mbs is set aside for P2P.
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? =)
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.)
-- Stanislav Shalunov
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.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
can you believe how bad DCO fuct up the network this past week with the border firewall complex? my god, that was wretched.
i had a prof come to me lately (about 2 months ago) asking why his newly installed kazaa was downloading so slowly. he tried to bullshit me saying he was using it to distribute research material. that lasted all of about 2 seconds =)
Unfortunately, the PacketShaper is a little smarter than this... it doens't solely rely on ports to identify traffic. It actually analyzes the stream data as it passes through the system, and recognizes the individual P2P protocols in use (among hundreds of other specific traffic types and sub-types). Some P2P protocols are quite crafty and send their data over a seemingly innocent HTTP stream... but the PacketShaper catches those too... ;)
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, and universities/schools have been an important customer since P2P networks blossomed...
Should have been "From the Really Slow News Day Department".
If they have it shaped or whatever they call it to reduce mainly P2P then "old school" warez etc. can still be done by people who actually know what they are doing.....not to be a troll or anything but P2P programs only made it easier to get stuff. It was always available on IRC, ftp etc. before. It says it prioritizes web access. Whats to stop a network springing up that serves everything tunnelled over http, from port 80 (if thats one way it filters) or even as huge webpages of uuencoded files or base 64.
Necessity is the mother of invention after all...
This really isn't news. UCSB instituted the same policy starting January of 2001. As a result, all the P2P (napster being the most popular at the time) was dropped to less than a Megabit, while everything else was left functional. All of a sudden, ssh sessions and first person shooters became real-time again... UCSB's information about it is at http://www.resnet.ucsb.edu/information/bwinfo.htm. For the most part, all UCs are taking this stance and each of them are slowly acquiring Packeteer units.
I lived in the International House in UC Berkeley for 2 years (until this past May) and we always had great P2P speeds. We were on the UC pipe and I was downloading things at nearly 500 KB/s -- it was crazy. I even got bursts up to 800 KB/s. I loved UC Berkeley -- they told the RIAA to go f@ck themselves when they sent the administration a letter requesting Napster and other P2P programs be blocked. Its a shame everyone else is getting jipped -- well maybe UC Berkeley has already started doing the same thing.
In larger University campuses where most people in residence are hooked into a network most of the people will be running some flavour of Windows and a heck of a lot of them will have shared folders (whether intentionally, because they want to share with others on the network, or accidentally, because the drives were shared long ago and the user didn't notice).
;) ) on other people's drives.
There's a program - whose name I can't remember - that scans a network for shared folders. Friends at my university, U of Toronto, have told me of literally being able to find gigabytes of stuff (MP3s, movies, games, programs, homework -
"With DRM computer at U.C. Irvine, P2P computer shares you... with university authorities!"
I am so tired of these lamers who think that they have a right to get their mtv mp3s and movies, and think they are being pursecuted. Trading copywritten material is technically illegal, and also it costs loads of money in bandwidth. And if a company is going to take steps to stop that thats their right. The internet is survival of the fittest. Either learn other means to transfer data over the internet, and bypass the means of control, or shut up. "I can't download the latest TRL episode featuring my hero carson daley off Kazaa, BOOOO HOOOO" When i was on the LAN at college last year, stupid idiots left their PC's wide open. They left open sharefolder access, and also, these computers were covered in viruses. Stupid camwhores and morpheous phening ambercrombie and fitch lamos hogged up and slowed down the entire internet connections down to .2kb/s for an entire month. All education was hindered, and all html browsing was screwed. I went across the entire network clearing peoples HD's of mp3's and mpegs. And leaving .txt notes like "get Systemworks 2001 at the bookstore, and stop using your bullshit P2P apps, thank you." Lamers and Noobs need to get a serious wakeup call and I can't wait till the stranglehold on P2P apps by the govt and companies gets tighter. If you think about it, the PC nerds, programmers, and real technology buffs are going to constantly surpass what the govt or the companies throw at us(example: recent RIAA hacks, and XP SP1's horrid attempt to crack down on XP liscense piracy). As long as its made by humans, it can by cracked by humans. So i don't care what the govt does to the lamos, pierce their brains with anti-piracy chips. But they are never gonna get past little 30 year old johnny c++ programmer guru living in his parents basement.
Thanx for reading my rant. Venting the same kinda feelings when you would see any person come into a #channel on IRC and have them type "ASL?"....oh thats pure furious homer rage right there, DOSDOSDOSDOS....
Peace, -Ben
Notice that the explanation page says p2p bandwidth is throttled because it is "entertainment traffic", but games are given as much bandwidth as necessary if it's available. Games aren't entertainment?
There is the obvious solution, stop downloading copyrighted works. Given, not all p2p transters are illegal, though I don't think it would be wrong to say most are. That's what I've done, and I've constantly been mocked by suitemates who are running cracked versions of UT2k3 today.
But, that's not what you wanted to hear. Basically, You've got a HUGE body of moderately competant computer users with absolutely no money and still a desire to listen/watch/use whatever copyrighted stuff they can justify, you've also probably got an extremely fast LAN connection. Have someone run a direct connect hub on the LAN. Pass the IP around, and you'll probably fairly soon have something resembling my university (probably more, even, I believe your university has more students than does mine), of 1000 users sharing TERAbytes of data. Likely, the university doesn't care about it's local bandwidth, it's just stuff that goes over the internet that's really limited.
why not set up a server with phind or some varient running. I dont know how large UCI is but at my university of 4k students i can find any file i want on the network, it's just a matter of getting some way to search. I bet if you talked to your IT department they might even help you after you showed them how making network fileshares easy to search will cut down on the real culprit, off campus uploads/downloads.
--aiee
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.
Some students had some interesting opinions on the whole matter.
It has since been a couple of years, and they have extended their practice to blocking all other P2P ports. 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 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.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
As a student employee for IT at the University of Maine, I've had firstand experience with the situation.
In one year, the student bandwidth usage went from moderate to saturated - the entire off-campus pipe became 100% clogged. P2P was identified as the major problem, and after research, it was discovered that around the nation, universities with 10x or more bandwidth and close to the same number of students were having the exact same problem. Obviously, more bandwidth was not a solution.
the university purchased a system called 'packetshaper'. It was set to identify and de-prioritize P2P packets, allowing all others to pass through the network to the internet unhindered. Works great - and our bandwidth is used effectively.
nowhere in the above advice do you need more bandwidth than what your fingers (and toes (cf. girl)) can twiddle.
good luck!
thi
At my school they have been trying to block all the P2P programs for about a year. Because the the bandwidth was starting to affect what they considered "Mission Cridical Applications" such as all the administration software and and the courseware that they have going. The only problem is that every time they block a program, i run across another one that seems to work fine.
The answer, at least in my opinion, is via a QoS mechanism.
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
May we never see th
If someone "needs" 5 isos, it makes *far* more sense to talk to a local administrator ("You know, it would be really nice if we ran a local mirror of ftp.redhat.com" or whatever). That way, *he* sets up a mirror accessable to local users, the files get downloaded *once* at off-hours, and then they're accessable rapidly to any local users.
May we never see th
The UCI document indicates that all WWW traffic is given clear passage. This presumably means that SOAP traffic will also be unregulated. What if a new generation of P2P clients starts to use SOAP as its communications protocol? Then the P2P traffic will be flowing through ports currently identified as WWW, and the traffic shapers will have no way to distinguish between P2P and WWW.
Instead of clogging everyone else's pipes, why don't you do what we all used to do, back in the stone age of the early 80s- walk down the hall, borrow a friend's LP or CD, and make a copy! We all had to tape them (yeah, I know barefoot through the snow, blah blah). You guys can rip and burn CDs in minutes.
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.
If they wanted to be true bastard operators (Which some may even aggree they should in this situation) they would block p2p 100% from the resnet IPs and provide one single website interface to p2p networks, and keep full control over this application. That app is given limited bandwidth and download queues, and monitored for what is downloaded. If you d/l something copyrighted, they should report you to the authoritys, and if you are convicted of violating copyright, you should be expelled.
You cant argue with the above logic, as if your not breaking a law, there is nothing to worry about, right?
Its amazing how many people bitch and moan that they arnt allowed to use other peoples money and resources to break the law, yet when solutions like the above that prevent that exact thing yet allow legal use are made available, they bitch and moan about those as well.
Not only is UCI being extreamly over fair in this, they are still going out of their way, spending no doubt the same amount of money, to assure you CAN use p2p, legally or not, only making sure it wont interfear with others internet use.
If you want T3 speeds to the internet, shell out the $35,000 per month and get one to your house.
This isnt DSL here where it may not be available.. for that kind of money the phone company will MAKE it available to you.
Dont want to spend that much just so you can leech movies and mp3s? Funny, nether do they.
Being a student and employee of a State univeristy for the last 4 years, I hardly see how this is news. 4 years ago, Napster started eating bandwidth and was blocked because of the costs. It's increased every year with "kids" coming in and expecting to be able to download the lastest CD they saw on MTV for free. Last year our university installed a packet shaper and instantly saw an improvement in "mission critical" applications, but still allowed people to use the P2P applications they always whined about not getting.
Now the real problem is no longer bandwith - it's controled however we want - but we are now considering blocking Kazaa for a completely different reason. We get at least 5 notices from the MPAA a week of students violating the DMCA by sharing movies. Just the headaches we have to go through with dealing with these is enough to warrant the blocking of this service. While I personally don't care what we do, I'm sure that there'll be lots of whining if we do. It doesn't seem to matter how much we tell people that the MPAA and RIAA are actually watching, they think that they can't get caught.
As far as the original question of what to do. Your university said that web traffic has highest priority. I'd recommend that you get HTTP Tunnel and the high speed subscription ($5) and perhaps e-Border for using any programs that don't support SOCKS. This is just a work around that I've discovered works well when needed and it's used by so few people that it's unlikely it'll be stopped soon (that is until I posted it on Slashdot).
The college I attend does the same thing, only they don't tell you about it. AND what's worse is my old isp did the same thing to their cable modems. In fact, they actually blocked a few P2P applications without telling customers.
My advice, find a program that they haven't capped because it isn't widely used. Last year in the dorms, I ran a Carracho server and ended up being able to use over 1meg of bandwidth per second!
Here at Boston University where I'm a graduate student, during the summer, I get ping times around 90 msec to a specific server off of campus. Now that students are back in the dorms...350 msec to the same server. This is highly a factor of day of the week and time of day (i.e. during a weekday around noon....I get back around 180 msec...students are in class).
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
nice...what a little ammount of code it takes to crash IE
Your UC tution doesn't even cover the chalk/erasable markers. Taxpayers are paying for your bandwidth!
Even at USC, your entry into the school would be a private contract, take it or leave it.
I wonder if the packet shaper can throttle per MAC address
It can.
Over here at UCSC they have adopted another technique. As long as you don't upload more than 1Gig in 24 hours they are happy. Of course our connection is MUCH fatter (OC-12) than UCI's. The downside is that when people ask "How do I keep from uploading 1G a day?" they answer "Don't share."
Oh well, there goes the P2P neighborhood.
Wow, I'm a UCI student and I never would have thought of posting this news. I did read the resnet page and was aware that UCI gave P2P lower priority than other usages, but I didn't think it was news. So far in my attempts to download using kazaa lite have been unsuccessful. I have never even gotten a transfer to initiate. tomkit
The problem with what UCI has done is that, in adiition to limiting p2p programs, they also limit overall bandwidth very drastically. Two years ago, before the p2p restrictions were put in place, I lived in the dorms and we were able to get excellent speeds on any downloads (routinely over 400k/sec if the server we were downloading from was fast enough). Now I am able to only get 30-40k/sec maximum, regardless of time of day, and perhaps 100 bytes or so on p2p transfers. Now, some of you might say "30k is plenty for academic needs," but that answer is very short-sighted. As most anyone will agree, morale is an important part of any undertaking involving large amounts of people, and education falls under that umbrella. Since UCI resnet provides 24-hour service to students that live on-campus, they cannot expect to meet simply academic needs and nothing else. The students at UCI need to have something to do when they are not doing school-related activities, and anyone familar with the Irvine area will know that there is very little to do, leaving various internet activities as the top ways to keep yourself entertained. If UCI students don't even have the ability to entertain themselves on the internet, they won't be a very happy bunch, and this is evidenced by the masses of students that leave campus as soon as possible and go home for weekends/breaks/whatever else.
Also, the reasoning behind all of this seems more to be a result of resnet being a bunch of cheap bastards than them really caring about academics/pirating/whatever. In my correspondence with them, and in mass emails and PR-type announements they have made, I have gotten the impression that money has a lot more to do with this than any sort of ethical concerns, but that they have used these so-called ethical concerns in order to justify further limitation of on-campus internet connections. Personally, I am very angry with paying part of my fees to pay for such a pitiful internet connection that is drastically worse than even a regular, 30 dollar a month cable modem (in both p2p speeds and overall web speeds)...and if anyone here happens to go to UCI or anything and agrees with me, go ahead and go to http://resnet.uci.edu/feedback.html and tell them what you think.
Throttling creates a shit load of traffic inself.
not if they use TCP rate control (which a PacketShaper can do)
It sounds like your network admins would benefit from one of my PacketShaper classes. Either that, or they just aren't aware of the port 80 problem; you should let them know.
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.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
I wrote that post specifically saying that the approach that UC Irvine was using (trying to detect P2P traffic) had holes, and should be moved to a quota/priority system.
I *also* listed some of the ways to bypass such a system, which, despite your claim, was not the question in the article.
Finally, I wasn't responding to the article directly. I was responding to another post, which was *also* talking about detecting and limiting P2P traffic, making my post quite relevant.
Redundant my foot.
May we never see th
My college is using a packeteer packet shaper. Http connections get highest priority, and guess what? giFT uses http to transfer files. It actually get priority over other types of traffic.
So see how the bandwidth is allocated. There may still be a way to share files.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1=PacketShaper&OS=Pack etShaper&RS=PacketShaper
I would hope P2P will eventually evolve to overcome this limitation. If there are P2P programmers out there, how hard would it be to have the clients realize who's on your local subnet and who's outside of it? Give priority to connections inside the local (and higher capacity/cheaper) network, and automatically throttle down connections that go through routers, and safe everyone a little grief.
The way it is now, the software has to evolve to keep the RIAA on its heels... How much of this traffic hogging can we blame on all the crap files they're spewing out everywhere? I say sue the RIAA for using up the bandwidth of all the universities, if it wasn't for them, we'd only be downloading stuff once!
Fortunately, here at Georgia Tech, we've got gobs of bandwidth (OC-12) and they don't seem to scream too often about P2P use.
I know how to fix them and thier 'lil bandwidth lockout ;-)
:80 only. You have priority.
:80 crap, create a wrapper for gnutella queries/connects that make it look like a http protocol web surf.
1: if they use a port-only verification scheme, then create/connect to sharing servers at
2: If they use data integreity check for
coming from the guy who made the submission and is paying 15,000 dollar a year for tuition...... just put yourself in my shoes for a minute..... really........ just for a minute, and then realize that having a really slow p2p connection really is hard to deal with. You try dealing mainly with mirc and ftp..........
grendel20
Next year Cornell is going to implement a paying structure where $27/month buys you unlimited local traffic and 1.2GB external traffic. Beyond that, external traffic costs half a cent per megabyte.
I think a main purpose is to encourage local file-sharing without actually encouraging it in a legal sense.
Of course, it would really suck for some poor student's server to get slashdotted...
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it might happen.
We have 2 Packeteer 8500s now and are probably going to start using them soon. Instead of limiting P2P traffic to a specific amount, we'll probably just use the priority feature, P2P traffic will have a lower priority than all other traffic. So long as the links aren't full, the traffic will not be affected, but if the links start maxing, the Packeteers will start slowing P2P traffic, allowing the other traffic to continue at its normal pace.
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.
Once the RIAA gets wind of this they'll try to get the high speed ISPs to put something like this in place.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
...or any other Gnutella client, I would imagine.
:)
Here's how: (For Bearshare, off the top of my head)
1) Clear out connect.dat, hosts.dat, and servers.dat in your "db" directory. Leave them as blank files
2) Clear out your known servers (on the "Service" tab in BS)
3) Uncheck the "Connect to service.Bearshare.net" box on the "Services" tab
4) Enter one friend's IP into the known servers box on the "Services" tab
5) Have the rest of your dorm buddies do the same thing.
6) Fire it up.
Your client should immediately try to connect to your friend's IP. When he/she comes up, you will have started your own private Gnutella network. Other users (dormies, other students, etc) can connect up and share, too. If you advertise this a little, as someone has already suggested, you will have sh!tloads of files in no time at all
Amusez-vous!
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
A new bill to save Internet radio, HR5469, will be voted on Tuesday, October 1, by the House of Representatives. Please
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I had to do the same thing a Georgia Tech last fall/spring. Since i graduated i dont know if the situation has gotten any better but it was pretty bad there. had the 2-4 second latency thing as well. Although we werent limited at the dorms we were limited on the main campus pipe, iirc 150 M/s , and it was always saturated. They wree in the process of getting the $$ to upgrade the dorm hardware so they could limit stuff, hopefulyl they've gotten some of it done.
On the plus side, the phone line was excellent, 50k dialup connection, just enough for some good counterstrike or brood war : - D
But UMass amherst has been doing this for over a year. The worst is they also place lower priority on the bandwith coming from the doorms than their own oit company. Leaving me with a 999 ping to most quake servers.
Liberty.
It's not the PacketShaper that's destroyed the ability to use the internet, it's all the selfish jerkoffs running p2p programs with no consideration as to how their activities were harming others. The schools are just taking the actions necessary to prevent their internet connections from being saturated to the point of useless by these losers. Plain and simple; all of the problems that people are complaining about here are due to the selfishness of a few users using p2p apps. They are not the fault of the schools, or of traffic shaping hardware.
Huzzah!
Do not pay for tuition. You see, the money wasted on Ethernet running Kazaa could be used to actually buy the products you intend to continuously pirate.
You do know that there are legitimate uses for large bandwidth. You don't want dialup when you've 10 Mb of PDF files to download. Of course, I get the impression that you seem to be at an educational facility only to get porn DivX's and pirated movies and the latest games.
Nice... Although I wonder why people with external IP addresses (like me) are allowed to use the search engine to find out that a lot of copyright-infringing material is shared. I can't download the actual files, but RIAA / MPAA might want to use this to put pressure on those responsible for running the network.
My suggestion: put some IP-level restriction on the search as well.
I used to live in the dorms last year. Even then they have had the bandwidth to all P2P networks limited to 2% of the total bandwidth. Of course you are going to have extremely slow speeds. However there are many alternatives that you should be well aware of. If you believe the extent of your music/movie/bootleg collection should be found on Kazaa then you haven't been tapping the correct resources. I myself was harassed many a time by the Residential Networking Admin, Ted Roberge. All of us who liked to use lots of bandwidth knew him well. Here is one of the many emails I have received from em.
>I am sending you a graph showing your IRC >bandwidth use for the last 24 hours. The graph >is primarily for IRC, not web surfing, e-mail >etc etc.
>I do not block or limit IRC use, however, I do >monitor the top users and as you are clearly >using more than your fair share of bandwidth, >especially your uploading to the internet, I am >asking you to exercise more concern for >bandwidth use and cut back considerably. Your >peak usage for irc consumes almost 10% of all >available bandwidth for the entire housing >network. Excessive bandwidth use affects all >users on the housing network. If this >continues, I will have no other choice but to >limit your bandwidth.
>Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
>Best
Figure it out pal...P2P is dead for us EDU's. If you want to get shit at good speeds use IRC, find some connections, get hooked up with a few ftps, serve as a dump. Of course all this must be done while still avoiding our lovely resnet admin, because he will harass you.
Jesus Christ, please shut the hell up. Nobody gives a flying fuck where you or your assclown excuse for a family went to college. Why don't you take the fries out of the deep fryer, flunky?
We've actually been keeping our bandwidth down at Georgia Tech via a neat little student-run/built Samba crawler, know as BuzzSearch.
:D )
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
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
I'm paying $40.00 a month for my 768K DSL line,
$100/month for internet service [including domain hosting, static IP's, no BS from the ISP], $3600/year for tuition, close to that for books, I'm working 8-10 hours a day, doing calculus homework 3 hours a day or more and it's very damned hard to have any sympathy for the poster's bandwidth problems.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
No one can blame a college for blocking p2p programs. You'r eusing the university's service, the university's bandwidth, and in some instances, the university's computers.
Someone want to post some legit things to use p2p for? Researching? Getting the latest notes on psychology? Sorry, but if that's done, most places set it up through the university's website. A quick and easy (and free) download.
Speaking as a UK academic sysadmin, transparent bandwidth control is something I also do. Our academic link to the net is only 2Mbit at present and all it takes is a few bandwidth hogs trying to download warez or using P2P applcations to really slow down access for legitimate users.
One thing I have done is limit bandwidth according to MIME type - download HTML and it runs at top speed. Download binary files from certain segments on the network and your bandwidth is limited. This I implemented after finding someone downloading a 600Mb RAR file (OfficeXP.rar - go figure - The only thing that is puzzling me is exactly what he was going to do with it - he didnt have access to a burner and so had no way of getting the data off the box.)
As for P2P applications, there is no way I would (or could) allow these things to run otherwise I'd be opening us up to all kinds of problems along with having FACT on my back. These guys visit me from time to time and ask what I'm doing to stop copyright infringement(!). Exactly how legal this is I'm not sure however if they suspect something they can arrange a search by the police which obviously could cause problems.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that UCI allow P2P at all, and suspect that in the near future this sort of thing will be getting blocked from the peer or be a condition of bandwidth provision.
In some comments of this discussion it was proposed to have an internal file-sharing system for the university's (and I don't mean UCI specifically) students so that people have access to a variety of interesting files while no external traffic is generated (well, some people will have to get fresh content by other means, but everything needs to be retrieved only once).
Anyway, while this is beneficial for all participants (those paying the traffic bills and the students), can the network people allow this? They must assume that copyright-infringing material is shared if internal transfers rise to giga- or terabytes per day... Can they be legally held responsible for looking the other way?
Here's what a freind and I did when CU (Uni of Colorado @ Boulder) did the same exact: took the opennap code, hacked in SSL, created a windows client that used stunnel, made and installer and distributed. Result: a internal to campus (so fast as hell) p2p network that uses to encrypted traffic to avoid application level shapeing. Lesson: using encryption and smart network coding, even the best filter can be told to take a flying leap.
In first year (at Fanshawe College) when i started paying attention i had over 10 GB a day outgoing traffic plus my own downloads to keep my pirated movies current. Second year they blocked all P2P traffic. This year they are limiting it. After seeing last year how much normal web browsing was affected by rampant file sharing i think that limiting P2P is a great idea. That way i can still check out the occaisonal artist i want to find out if i like enough to buy their CD (yes, i grew up and stopped being SUCH a theif) but i can still do legitimate stuff at blazing fast speeds.
Just some redundant thoughts from an AC
...AND you'll have to have a better plan than that to beat the packeteer.
It can be beaten, and I'm sure there are one or two kids in those dorms smart enough to figure it out, but it's not nearly as easy as what you are thinking.
Anyway, it's not censorship at all, did you even read the article? People running filesharing software on the LAN have effectively DDOSd their peers (pun intended) on campuses worldwide, it's a real issue. UCI has taken a very balanced approach to the problem, unlike a number of other Universities - they are NOT prohibiting filesharing, they are NOT trying to punish people that use a lot of bandwidth - instead they have introduced a rather sophisticated piece of hardware that is configured to allow filesharing, but not to allow it to compete for all the bandwidth, just around a third or a quarter of it, with the rest reserved for other uses.
I applaud them. And no, I'm not going to tell you how to get around the packeteer. If you figure it out, I urge you to keep your mouth shut too. If more than one or two of these kids figure it out, UCI will be forced to take more draconian measures, and I don't want that to happen, do you?
I will point out that one way to work with the Packeteer, rather than against it, is to organise Gnucleus Lan/Overpeer etc. - remember that your bandwidth from point to point on the LAN is NOT being restricted, just the incoming and outgoing traffic, so if you set the clients up so that they only go outside of the LAN when necessary you'll get better performance.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
although you'll have to cough up a few dollars a month - or alternatively find somebody outside to act as your free proxy. As the vast majority of people have said though you can't really whinge - and it's pretty likely you could find most stuff on a univeristy network you could ever want - except perhaps the extremely specialst pr0n.
I attend Western Washington University, and we've been using Packeteer for (if memory serves) a year now. Our situation is a little different, let me explain why.
First off, Western isn't a small school, but with about 12,000 enrolled, it's not small either. About 3,500 live on campus and on the WWU LAN. The internet connection afforded to the residence halls is in the form of a fractional T3, of which we lease a 1.5mbyte/sec connection. Back in 2000, when school started we had less than half that connection, and Napster was at its peak. It's probably not necessary to say that our network connection was completely laid to waste by the massive amount of traffic requested of it.
When Packeteer was introduced at the beginning of last year, things seemed mostly normal. HTTP traffic moved along nicely. Then, ResTek (the group who handles the residential network) decided to limit our traffic to 300MB a day, and if you went over it more than once, you would get your port pulled. However, this was made tolerable because from 2am to 10am, you could rape the internet as much as you damn well pleased without repercussion.
After massive complaining, though, they started implementing this homebrew traffic limiter which sharply cut your bandwidth as you downloaded, and quickly made online gaming impossible.
However, we've began to cope with it. We have local game servers, and a local DirectConnect hub which has become a good place to hang out, meet people, and exchange files.
I'm curious though, what kind of connections other colleges of our size have. 1.5MB/s seems quite measly for 3,500 people (granted, not all of them use the net for much more than email).
If you head over to ResTek's webpage, check out the bandwidth section, specifically the FAQ and see what you all think. I'm curious.
If people are getting annoyed by these bandwidth shaping restrictions, I'm surprised someone hasn't created a software that employs the http port? How would they restrict traffic then -- Or does this not work for some reason?
I hear a lot of pissing and moaning, but they should shape so each terminal get's a 5.6k (like a 56k modem) or a 28.8 modem with the great low latency of a lan. If you need to download 5 fucking ISO's and you are going to college, I'm sure you can afford the $5 to order a 5 disk set from www.cheapbytes.com you stupid bastards. Do the net a favor and buy those linux discs. The only place I can get these awesome movies of this jap chick drinking a quart of jiz is from my P2P application so stop fucking with the P2P.
It says on their website, " Browsing the web is done by every resident, and nothing is as frustrating as waiting for a web page to load.".
Is it NOT frustrating to have major lags
on telnet/ssh as this is a realtime protocol.
Telnet/ssh SHOULD be given the highest priority as they dont use much bandwidth anyway.
This way you have happy http users, happy telnet/ssh users and somewhat happy p2p users.
Its supposed to proxy you Kazaa port to a http poert but my copy despite stating a 20 trial period did not work, stating reg code required. Anyone get it tested. Any interesting links relating to this issue. Any solutions abound like this besides httptunnel.
Neo Modus over port 80, read the reviws mixed
They could force everybody to use their proxy servers for port the web, by denying all access to external networks. That way no p2p program can get thru.
but public, HIGHER education is not paid for in taxes. Well, it is, but not nearly as much as you think. According to my financial summary for this year, it's going to be $16,000 to live, eat, and be educated on the UCI campus. 6000+ of these dollars go to tuition, which pays for public access terminals and research bandwidth. THEN, there's an additional 8000 dollars that goes to dorm costs, most of which is then spent on the bandwidth. AND ALL THIS MONEY COMES FROM THE HARD WORK OF PARENTS AND STUDENTS (ignoring those on scholarship).
My point here is that WE THE STUDENTS pay for the bandwidth, you insensitive clods! You can keep talking how it's supposed to be used for education, but it is well known that colleges for a long time have been flaunting their highspeed networks to get the better geeks to attend their colleges. It was not written in the brochure that the bandwidth promised would have restrictions.
WE pay for it, not the taxpayers. WE WILL NOT BE REIMBURSED IF THE TOTAL COST OF BANDWIDTH USE GOES DOWN. So how is this fair?
Or, to put it in a better perspective, YOU THE PARENTS ARE PAYING FOR A SERVICE THAT IS BEING DENIED TO YOU!! If you are being charged highspeed access charges, but not being allowed to use that access as you see fit, shouldn't you get your money back? Shouldn't the dorms then allow you to bring in your own connection from the local COX Cable?
This comes from the university that funded a first class Hawaii retreat for the "important" staff because they "need to get away".
I'm a student that lives off-campus, but still pays for the bandwidth usage on campus. Fees went up but bandwidth went down for my fellow students. I'm willing to help foot the cost, but not if they're not getting the full product!
If you're lucky this means that the official computers at Univ. are not filtered, only the dorm ones. If thats true you can sneak a forwarding software onto their servers to get some real bw. However, you'll probably get suspended once caught..
Study. Get an internship and prepare for the real world. Play a multiplayer game.
I am all for the University's right to limit what traffic is being moved over their network. I do believe that they should limit their restrictions to, say, perhaps an 18-hour window every day and relax things at night and perhaps on Sunday - there can't be that many legitimate reasons that other network traffic should take precedence at those times. "Bandwidth costs money"; but if they are paying for a number of specific connections; unless their transfer is capped by their provider then I don't see restricting any student's use. They are paying tuition and it includes network access - granted, maybe 'network access for academic use' but if that is the case then all non-web use that cannot be proven it is not recreational should then be banned; and perhaps a plan should be set in place that users that exceed a rate cap or would like their network use outside of school-related activities then pay a premium. If we adults can pay outrageous rates for broadband; you kids can get a taste of it too.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
I can't use the bandwidth paid for by Mommy and Daddy to steal music! WHAAA!
I'm amazingly unsympathetic.
PacketShaper work entirely by checking the destination ports in the packets. Just change the ports for kazaa and direct connect and your traffic will be classed as "default" instead of peer-to-peer. Ports to avoid are 1412 for kazaa, and 412-413 for Direct Connect. Use port 80 or something, and smile :)
At least until someone decides to buy a PacketLogic from Netintact ;)
Most students here leave KaZaA running 24/7. This means that even if they only download, say, 30 megs per day, they're trying to upload hundreds of megs. To make things worse, they don't even use KaZaA Lite - so they get plenty of spyware with their p2p apps. (Yesterday I brought KaZaA Lite with Speedup to a neighboring dorm room. For kicks, on the same CD I tossed Mozilla and Exact Audio Copy. The latter was a pain to set up, as usual, but they loved the combination of new software.) Schools have no choice because most students don't understand the issues ITS faces. I hear plenty of them complaining about how slow the "internet" is, because they use the net almost exclusively for p2p apps. And I've stopped trying to explain the reasons WHY p2p is so slow, because they never want to hear them.
But the connection is plenty fast to download the occsional mp3. It just means that people become extremely happy when I bring Exact Audio Copy over; yesterday I also installed CDex on my computer because EAC has issues on some CD drives. The article a few days ago about a CD with open source Windows software was of great interest to me, since I've already given out half a dozen CDs with various programs.
Like the rest of us.
I have a general problem with draconian measures that many institutions implement. If the bandwidth is available (i.e. it is not being used) then it should be made available. There are many tools that allow flexible real-time traffic shaping. If the network admins were intelligent they would have implemented one of these solutions to make everyone happy. You know its easy to look down on people especially when they are younger. This makes it easy for many (including other young people) to defend such actions by saying that another person's usage of the network isn't valid. That is very sad a short sited.
After spending the last 2 years in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's dorms, I can attest to how crappy these packetshapers really are. True, everyone on our floor was swapping files on the network, but the implementation was horrible! For example:
I tried to forward some X packets from the CAE building so I could work on a circuit design project. The latency/speed was so poor that the connection was completely lost! Two VERY important points can be brought up here:
- This was over SSH, so the port being used was 22. They had the audacity to limit port 22 action.
- This was completely over the campus' internal network. The packets didn't touch the external Internet. Before the packetshaper, I was getting speeds of 16Mbps from the same server!
So, I called up DoIT, our IT guys, and complained. "We'll look at that right away." Sha right. Never happened. Had to use sneakernet to do all my homework on the opposite side of campus (~1 mile). Not fun in Wisconsin during the winter. Yay technology.IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Working at a college with roughly the same bandwidth, I can tell you from experience that when our traffic went unchecked Housing's draw destroyed the network. Culprits? P2P.
Let's not even get into the legality of trading music. Personally, I could care less. However, when it every student's dowloads are glogging 40-70Mbps of downloads ALL DAY LONG, IT IS A PROBLEM! Our email servers would not recieve off campus email. We couldn't sync off-site copies of our DNS. We couldn't access off-site Web sites, much less download updates and drivers for our systems or do any online journal research.
Ever since we blocked and/or limited P2P traffic, life (network wise) on campus has been a lot nicer. If you want to do P2P... hook up your modem, pay for an account with an ISP that doesn't limit downloads and have at it... that way only you have to deal with the slow speeds, not everyone else.
P2P use on campus is a classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons.
I know there have been a lot of people whining about all of the slowdown at college campuses, and I've got a way to get around it.
Put up a flyer that says: 'I FIX SLOW COMPUTERS ON WEEKENDS.'
Now you might be up to your ass in free work for a few days... but you probably will meet ALL THE GIRLS IN THE ENTIRE DORM... because 1) no self-respecting man in the world will admit to a slow computer and 2) everyone thinks their computer is slow because it can't anticipate their desires and 3) everyone has already burned their cash.
Looking for women requires the max interaction you can get. Don't cast your fishing pole once and then get upset and throw it in the water when you don't catch a fish. Pretty soon you'll be nkee deep in women, you won't even remember what a computer looks like. Don't obsess, if you're interested ask for coffee and be polite and gracious. Old civility mixed with young enthusiasm is a great combo.
If you play it right, you might end up with a beautiful veterinarian with some serious domestic skills... it worked out for me.
Think about it. Use the Force.
Implement bandwidth usage metering...bill students or cut them off...
Problem solved.
here at University of Florida, the percentage of a student's rent that pays for their internet connection is negligible. negligible, as in, less than $10 per month. now, if you want to argue that we are being unfair by blocking p2p, then you're a fucking moron.
and our bandwidth dropped from near peak average, to less than half peak average, after blocking just 412 and 6699. so yeah, we're blowing this WAY out of proportion.
UCInet metrics
While I do work at UCI, I'm in a different dept. and don't know much about the workings of resnet. I do feel sorry for the support folks there, though, as most of the hacked windows boxes and klez-infected PCs come from reshsg.uci.edu.
UCI is quite attentive to security issues, as soon NetBIOS blocking at the border router will go into effect. This will keep off campus crackers from trying to break into windows PCs that have windows file sharing turned on.
Now if only commercial ISPs could learn a bit from UCI's policy...
My Daily photo website.
I work at UCI and was the one who implemented this. haha. hahaha. HAHAHAHAHA. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
My hats off to the University. We had to install a very similar product at my University because P2P was consumming all of the bandwith. It got to the point that it was nearly impossible to even get a ping inbound. We have been running fine, with a few tweaks here and there. HTTP ports are more important for college students who actually DO homework and use the web. P2P should come second or even third, who's counting? If there is anything you should learn from colege, its that once your out get ready to subscribe to DSL or cable, because you can't go back to dial-up.
I'm in Higbie right now and am getting about 300 ms round trips (and no bad packets).
The key is to statically address your machine instead of using the school's lame DHCP (which doesn't even work with dhcpcd anyways).
I bet your school is NOT using packet shaper - which analyzes the packets, not just the ports. They are likely using switch management to limit port usage.
Believe me, an HTTP packet does not look like a kazaa, morpheououoeos, etc packet.
Sounds like a bunch of incompetant admins to me.
-Adam
Tell them what the school is doing to you; that you can't get your education and that they are wasting their tuition dollars and dorm fees($15K/year minimum at most places these days for 1 year including food, books, fees, etc).
:-)
Or, maybe they will make you come home to go to community college and every one will win
Prior to installing the PS, a political decision was made to cap the dorm subnets via our provider's onsite router. This did NOTHING but hurt our residence halls. P2P apps were still used and they consumed every last bit within the cap as expected. Dorm residents couldn't load simple webpages. ICQ couldn't even maintain a connection. It did nothing but penalize those in the cap. Meanwhile the P2P usage by faculty/staff grew immensely. Go figure.
... and have control of the network. If you don't like it, figure out how to hack your way into uncapped p2p bandwidth.... at the probable price of expulsion of course.
Be happy you are priviledged enough to get to go to college (and have your own PC!) and stop whining about not being able to engage in highly illegal activity. There are poor kids in slums who won't even get to finish high school.
People make me sick sometimes. When I went to school, I had to wait 2 hours for a networked PC at the lab, forget about having one in my dorm... a 486 was about $4000 back then. Stop your bitching and learn something for jc's sake.
l8,
peeved at your idiocy
Orange County happens to be a big musical hotbed, you just have to get out of the cocoon of the greater Irvine area. There's a lot of activity especially within the Punk music scene. It doesn't take long to get to either, go to Newport Beach and there's a new/used record store on every block, (I suggest Second Spin).
That being said, I live off campus with a cable modem, so I can't really complain. The solution is to move out.
I came to college, and I find that I can't move the contents of my house into the dorm! I actually have to *share* this space with someone, and not use the whole building! Evil!
I came to college, and the library won't let me check out all the books! I should be able to have all the books that I want, as long as I want them! Evil!
Grow up...you've really missed the point as to why you are at college and what you have paid for. ObClue: When resources are limited (and bandwidth is, no matter what you think), resources have to be shared, sometimes rationed and occasionally denied.
Life in the real world is going to be very, very unpleasant for anyone who can't grasp that.
OK maybe this isn't clear:
;)
It was not my password, it was a user's account on a system I administer. As I force users to login with ssh, this had to be stolen in a local attack.
So, no this is shiney stainless steel pan calling kettle black
At Washington University in St. Louis, We also have these restrictions. All those p2p programs are significantly slowed or halted on campus. So instead, on-campus students are just trading amongst themselves. We have created our own Direct Connect Hubs that hold gigs upon gigs upon gigs of data. Now, the network is clogged with internal traffic. I'm not saying this is any better, I'm just saying that students will always find a way around restrictions they don't like.
There are active measures against dumb passwords. This password was not guessed, it was intercepted.
The same thing happened at my undergraduate school (macalester college in St. Paul), but they had 1.5 mbit, then 3mbit, and now 9 mbit connections to the internet for 1200 on-campus students. So it made alot of sense for them...
But what I did was start a school-only file sharing network. You had to have a school email address, you had to have a local IP (I used a firewall to block off-campus people), and you have to choose software that works well.
I used Limewire 1.4b because it allows the alteration of the connect and ok strings, but current opennap server clones look to work amazing. You should check out slavanap.
As for the client side, winmx works great for windows, though there isn't really anything available for the mac or linux. You should see if you can't invest some time in a java opennap client, it may be worth your time.
One of the big things you need to worry about is publicity. UCI cannot officially sanction the network, so you need to keep it under their radar. As well, you can't have any non-UCI people using it...that slows the network and opens you up for easier RIAA/MPAA prosecution. If I remember correctly though, the UCI web page offers space...and only allows UCI people to access them. Good for an informational page on what people need to do...though my suggestion is to not leave your email address. Just leave files and instructions. Otherwise you will get ALOT of questions, and at UCI, TOO MANY people asking for you to come to the dorms and help them. I did it about 20 times...but then again, my undergraduate school is about 1/20 the size of UCI.
Ahh, and you are a UCI student eh? I recently arrived as well, but as an ICS grad student. Maybe I'll see you around.
I hope this helps.
- Josiah Carlson
I have been trying to get my University to install such a program, I have sent them this site link, as well as been in contact with the network admin at UCirving so that we can get underway My University is a small one, we only have 15Mb, and a fairly large portion of the student body lives on campus since we have townhouses and dorms, this puts a strain on the network and at times I have timed out trying to load this page because network traffic is so bad. Instead of using P2P programs, set up a Peer network your friends, floor mates, and such, buy music and share it. this is just as illegal as downloading But atleast you are not using up the bandwidth for people that want to do there work, On a rainy day I have problems doing reseach since everyone is inside downloading.
Nice name calling.
here at University of Florida, . . .
So in other words, you're a low level schmo, probably a work-study or a student assistant, on the "inside" at a school. Color me unimpressed.
blah, blah, blah, can't download non-school related material via the school network very quickly, blah, blah,blah.
jeez, let me cry you a river.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
color me not-concerned-with-an-AC's-opinion.
Back when I was attending school at USC (South Carolina... the OTHER USC), I worked in the CS dept. We got our public image trashed when we "accidentally" turned off access to Napster. (It was about 3-4 years ago... Napster was really the only game around at the time).
Eventually, after a massive student backlash, there was a retraction published in the paper along with a sad statement, claiming access was "accidentally blocked with the addition of our new firewalls."
But in all honesty, blocking access to P2P networks is hardly new. The bandwidth eaten up by sharing files is huge, obviously -- not to mention the legal ramifications -- both things being something a University most likely wants to wash its hands of.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Go Yale!
UCI Resnet has been filtering it's p2p traffic for a year now. If you want the speed, go to non-resnet locations. There is 802.11b in the student center and the gateway commons study center. As of last spring, those segments of the UCI network were not being filtered for p2p traffic. If you don't have a laptop, you are out of luck.
man, I can't believe what timing my parents had. When I entered UCI in the fall of 2002, napster was still rampant and the dorm resnet had not put a cap on bandwidth for anything. as spring quarter 2001 came to a close, there was rumor that napster was shutting down for good, so every computer in every room in every dorm hall was set to download whatever it could -- crappy mp3s of crappy n'sync ditties, digitized versions of pink floyd epics, even small mp3s of toilet flushing sounds -- anything was downloaded because it COULD be downloaded. Sounds were free and the software ran as fast as it damn well wanted. Last year, I got my own place and felt pity for those who had just moved into the dorms; napster was gone and the only thing left was kazaa, morpheus, and audiogalaxy. Now those programs have a bandwidth cap on them. How sad. Just thought I'd brag.
direct connect can have the ports changed and lots of other cool stuff like that here at RIT kazaa is supposedly slowed and some ports for other programs are blocked but resnet has been having trouble doing anything about direct connect. just search google to find their download sit
UC Irvine is in Southern California. A week or two ago we had an article about U of Southern California doing the same thing. I bet what is going on here is the universities with a lot of Hollywood connections (that is certainly the case for USC) get pressured to shut down p2p by the movie industry.
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas or Arizona?
Just curious.
Color me not concerned with the opinion of a self-important work study.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I've just become a student at Carleton College, which happens to use the very same product (Packeteer's stuff) to limit P2P impact. Lately, there's been a major problem, which goes by the name of KaZaA 2.0. Apparently it looks exactly like Web traffic. Anyone know of a way to work around this? (If you respond, please e-mail me, too ... I'm not sure I'll have time to check the forum :-) )
Jyrinx
maurerl@carleton.edu
This is exactly how to handle the P2P bandwidth problem.
Kudos to them for implementing a sane way to let everyone do everything they want, while still ensuring that the people who actually need to do schoolwork can do it in peace.
Thanks for bringing this up. I might show it to others I work with in the computer department at my college so they can implement the same thing...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>The PS can and will find KaZaA traffic on whatever port it wants to use. It can't hide.
Note to self: Email root@kazaa.com and suggest they add some very light (ohhh, let's say 12-byte XOR) encryption to their transfer protocols...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
As I seem to recall it took less code to crash netscape... but I can't remember anymore... there were so many ways to crash netscape that you can't even rely on google to find the right one...
Why not just do your principles and your peers a favor and stop trying to cheat the system?
--"You are your own God"--
URI has implemented packateers to limit how much bandwidth P2P apps can use. Before school even got in session this year, around %90 of URI's pipe was being used by Kazaa. P2P software sucks and will take as much bandwidth as you allow it.
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
You're one of the last people left with unicode (chinese?) characters in their sig. You should know that as soon as you change anything in your "you" section, you'll lose the unicode characters. So avoid it!
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
I can confirm that this school is, in fact, using packet shaper. dahat is the incompetent one, not the admins.
the thing is that you guys are assuming what this guy says is fact. then play gets placed on the admins. truth is the post has a lot of misinformed information.
please excuse my spelling error. should be.. "then blame is placed.. " i just joined slashdot ;) and i dont know how to edit the post.. :\
My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as
Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31.
We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in
Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at
6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by
6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That
was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose
and Knights of Pithiests.
The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their
annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole,
which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They
weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my
pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough
word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were
imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying.
We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed.
So we're going back in a few years...
-- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]
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