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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.
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.
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
The only problem with that is then you will have an abnormally large amount of data going out on what appears to be an HTTPD port. The wonderfull thing about the packetshapers is they also give you nice colorful graphs that show the top 10 users, and you can even break it down farther than that. While this may work you would still have to be very careful about how much bandwidth you are using. I personally keep tabs on our top bandwidth users to make sure they are only using legitimate services. IE we don't allow the students to run FTP or HTTPD servers because our bandwidht is so limited.
The GPL-licensed gnucleus gnutella P2P client has a version specifically for this.
From the site: "Gnucleus LAN - If your college blocks gnutella use this to create an internal network for you and your friends. General rule is if you can play network games over your school network, gnucleus will also work. This version can be run on the same computer as the internet version."
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.
that's exactly what we do here at my school, rochester institute of technology...we used to have a direct connect hub over internet2 with other i2 schools but then it got to the point that us on the direct connect hub were using 90% of the i2 bandwidth.
solution: blocked i2 traffic thereby keeping it all internal...there were already enough users from our school that it didn't make too much a difference, and the more people that heard about it the more that got on....now we have an insanely fast DC hub just on the internal network where you can find just about anything!
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
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.
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...
STFU
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