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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.
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?
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!
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
How do I know all this? This is the job I do. I spent all of yesterday and this morning working on a Packeteer Packetshaper 4545. We don't block P2P. That's not the stance we felt we should take. We do however greatly limit the amount of bandwidth P2P applications can consume. We allot more to P2P after business hours. It's really interesting to watch response times plummet when I reboot the PS. For about 20 seconds, ping times climb to 800-1000ms. If I disable bandwidth shaping (which I did for about 10 minutes this summer to make a point during a meeting about the PS) P2P apps climb to the top and sufficate everything else. I can tell you that every regent's Unv in my state that is using a PS is severely limiting the amount of outbound bandwidth that's alloted to applications like P2P. Here at this Unv I give a average priority of 3 to all traffic classes that have known uses on campus. I set the default priorities to 2. I then raised the priority on HTTP and FTP to make them more responsive. I also gave a high priority to terminal emulators like SSH, telnet, and tn3270. Time sensitive applications like NTP and DNS were given a higher then average priority. I use garunteed partitions on different classes or groups of classes to kick start them or limit their consumption. It has worked extremely well for us.
P2P is a major thorn in our collective sides when it comes to the network. I don't think it should be blocked. I don't think that at all. I've gone to great lengths to ensure that it isn't entirely blocked and that other applications have the resources they need. I do think it needs to be kept under control so it doesn't hurt everyone else, those few students that actually use their connections to research and learn. Users that try to get around our bandwidth shaping by setting up tunnels to their buddies cable modem, using NNTP, HTTP, or FTP simply aggravate us and push closer to charging per megabyte transferred. I hope that day never comes.