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.
Packetshaper Actual Device.
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."
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!