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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).
Packetshaper Actual Device.
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!
"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.
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.
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.
(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
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?
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).
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!@
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.
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'
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
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.
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
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.
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.