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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?
That's what you have to do now. It's For Your Own Good (tm).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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.
He can probably go out and see a show and still have plenty of time to download Britney Spears' latest MP3. It will probably take all of 2 minutes.
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.
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.
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!@
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.
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.
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.
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
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'
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.
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. (-;
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.
It would help if people understood what was going on according to the document referenced; they aren't _cracking down_ on P2P at all (as some institutions are doing), simply downgrading its priority w.r.t. other forms of network traffic. If the network has 20Mb to spare, it may end up being used for P2P; but if it doesn't, P2P software doesn't get to fight fairly against E-mail, web browsing, and the all-important SSH session to fix the server backups.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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
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?
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
Or, even better -- complain with your feet and dollars. Go to a different school.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
(-1, Redundant); (-1, Disinteresting) - whatever.
sic transit gloria mundi
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
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".
That depends on what you like. The Middle East is a good place to start. That's on Mass Ave in Cambridge.
The Phoenix Landing has techno on Wednesday nights and drum n bass on Thursdays.
Saturday nights at the Cellar TWO BLOCKS from Harvard is free techno, but that's 21+
You can look up stuff on boston.citysearch.com, as well. If you're into electronic stuff, check out www.miscon.net. There's also some Boston area really dorky hip hop at http://www.donred.org (one of my everything2.com compadres!)
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?
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
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
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.
But I wont get disconnected at their discression unless I don't pay my bill.
If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'll let go cheap.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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?
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.
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.
1.2GB isn't a whole lot, less than the size of 2 CD images. I would hope they provide a good mirror site.
CD image, 650MB = $3.25
That's not what would get me, what would get me is listening to my mp3 radio stations. Plus that's not something you can host on the internal network.
128Kbps streamed media 1hr/day for 30 days = $9.00
I'm sure I listen a lot more than 30hrs. a month.
Seriously. At this point it is almost trivial to add encryption to any p2p program. I can only wonder why all the big guys haven't started doing this already.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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.
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 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
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.
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
There are active measures against dumb passwords. This password was not guessed, it was intercepted.
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
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas or Arizona?
Just curious.