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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.
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
"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.
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
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?
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!
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!@
Er. Sued? UC Irvine is just enforcing the terms and conditions of their student internet use policy. I haven't seen it, but I'm sure they've got one, and I'm nearly positive it looks like the ones any other university has. They're not censoring anything; they're not blocking anything. They're just prioritizing.
You want fast and cheap internet access? You accept their terms. You want to use university resources? Fine. Use them for academic purposes. Shocking. The administration will even wink and nod at some 'personal' use. Sensible. It means that people won't be trying nearly so hard to get around restrictions.
Value judgement? Well, sort of. Some would call it setting priorities. The campus pipe is only so wide. Does first call on that bandwidth go to people who are reading journal articles, sharing experimental results, and--heaven forbid--learning? Or does it go to the guy in the room down the hall who's too lazy and too cheap to go out to rent a copy of The Matrix?
In the majority of workplaces that I have experienced (and most have had an academic slant) as well as my university, network administrators have cared not one little bit about what I did with surplus bandwidth. As long as you don't screw things up for people doing real work--that's all that matters.
~Idarubicin
It's not about "piracy" - it's about bandwidth being a limited resource, plain and simple. If they didn't use packetshaping, other services would be slowed down or made unusable. They've reached the limit of offcampus bandwidth. It's at a point where they're saying: "what do we cut" -- and P2P traffic is the first to be limited. It's the best solution, since it uses up 99% of the bandwidth to begin with anyway. What, would you rather slow down webpage requests to increase bandwidth?
There is simply no way to allow for everyone using P2P and keep a usable network at the same time, without increasing costs. I've seen what happens when Napster overloaded our network, and after they applied packetshaping the usability was 100% better. And during off-peak times, Napster speeds went back up, so you could still do your downloading in the mornings.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
My school used to do this (not anymore, but its bound to be back). The packetshaping was done by user IP address -- when you surpassed a 24-hour limit, you started to have packet loss to the Internet (not campus servers).
The statistic about 10% of the users using 90% of the bandwidth is correct. It's not fair to everyone else.
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.
Not *everything* on P2P is copyrighted materials.
That didn't save napster.
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.
I agree. I'm an admin at a large university and I've seen the damage P2P does to our network. It doesn't materially slow down on-campus commections because we have a fiber backbone. However, we have a limited bandwidth (big limit, but it's a limit) connection to the internet (I don't have access to our i2 connection, darnit).
... . I can literally type 6-10 keystrokes faster than the packets can get through the network. In addition, I occasionally have to download 3-4 isos (new Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris version). A year ago, before they moved the dorms to the new backbone, it was a piece of cake ... I could DL a 3 CD-image set for Solaris in about an hour. Now, it's an overnight job (if I'm lucky).
... there are people on campus who have a productive use for the bandwidth ... the fact that UCI is permitting ANY P2P is (in my mind) a very tolerant step. If I had my way, I'd block it all.
DURING BUSINESS HOURS (read, when the student body is supposed to be in class) some 40% of our BACKBONE bandwidth is taken up by P2P running between the dorms. Personally, I'd like to see all that traffic blocked at the layer 3 switches, but that will not happen in an academic environment.
The net result is that if I connect to my Linux box at home to perform a security test on a Unix box at work (you're not testing unless you're attacking from an uinauthorized host), I have a terminal with a frame rate problem
In short, quitcherbitching
(and yes, I am one of those terribly libertarian slashdotters, but the ownership of a resource implies the right to control it's use)
utter rubbish
Ok.... I will answer pretending that you go to the University I work for... The problem isn't YOU sucking down MP3s and movies. Its not even everyone else doing it. Its you SHARING them.
You may notice that accessing someone elses PC on the network here goes pretty quick, but loading a web page is slow. You may try to ssh in from outside and find that slow.
Why?
Because inbound or internal bandwidth isn't a problem at all... its outbound. Its not the people AT the university using the network... its the people outside who are finding the stuff you are sharing and downloading it that are causing the vast majority of the bandwith usage.
All in all the answer, which I hate to give, is that people at dorms need to stop with the offering to the world of files on p2p systems. The bandwith usage is too great and it does most certainly hinder other peoples use of the network.
Your tutiton and that of your fellow students "pays" for the network (actually your tuition may pay for alot less than you think, the life blood of most Universities is the endowment, some schools could even run off it and not charge Tuition, Harvard being one example)
Sharing MP3s with the world is essentially allocating resources to people not in the University community. Now I don't mean to say thats bad or there is no good in doing it, however, when it becomes the single largest use of bandwith and interferes with others use of resources... then something bad is certanly going on.
Now here, rate limiting is defense of our network as the traffic caused by p2p filesharing is causing some of the routing equipment to run right up against its max capacity, and thats not a good way to be. If we try to throw more bandwith at it, we will just be more attractive to people downloading, and usage goes up to utilize the bandwith... rate limiting is the only scenario with a win there.
So the next time you can access across the boarders of your own network with reasonable speed, be glad p2p is rate limited. And the next time you can downlaod something via a p2p, again be glad that it wasn't shut off completely.
Bandwith is a limited resource... students need to learn to share it and use it wisely.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"