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Solutions for University File Sharing?
bbulzibar asks: "Indiana University, like many other Universities, is struggling to deal with P2P file sharing. At a recent meeting, faculty, staff, and administration were convinced that 'the University is going to have to take some sort of action in the future [to eliminate illegal activity on the university's network].' With no student input, I can only imagine the worst happening (limiting data transfer, suing students, taking funds out of the student technology fee). What kind of a solution could be recommended by a proactive student in order to avoid an ugly 'solution' and loss of file sharing, yet reasonable enough that the University will accept it? IU has outlined 4 options at the meeting. Your thoughts?"
you 'inform' the students that they need to share files within the network, and then the geekiest of them will run to setup a Direct Connect hub that's restricted to the university network. of course, the IT departments can't control the content, but atleast the bandwith won't be clogged up.
--Mike--
We used something called the packeteer (google it). It runs an embedded version of Linux and basically allows certain types of services (e.g. P2P, FTP) to use a certain ammount of bandwidth. Additionally, the top bandwidth users were sent nasty letters (anyone downloading over 2 GB/day off the internet was sent one. Intranet traffic was not regulated, and since our LUG had a large and up-to-date file server (ftp.lug.udel.edu) Linux ISOs were non-issues). That takes care of the bandwidth issue.
If you simply ban certain protocols, people will always find ways around it, so I think in the end education is really important.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Start a separate underground internal ad-hoc wireless network or something... the coffee can antenna does work, and it isn't that hard to make 'em.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
A university in this context is nothing more than an ISP, and accordingly, the university cannot be held responsible for the actions it's users take, illegal or otherwise. As with all ISPs, the university should produce an AUP, and activly discourage illegal activities, but no further action towards file sharing should be taken. Users who violate the AUP should be removed from the network. This however does not justify eavesdropping or port blocking. Students should be avised upon entry that they connect at their own risk.
Of course, the universities need to be aware that they musn't divuldge otherwise private information about their network users without a proper warrant, just as they would not do so with a student's records.
Don't get soft on this people, FILESHARING IS NOT A CRIME. There are countless legitimate needs and uses for p2p too numerous to list. Everytime you let someone take away your right to share or get a file, you're letting them take away one aspect of your freedom of speech.
Accordingly one should not abuse such freedoms. Trust me, the RIAA and the MPAA aren't putting out anything worth having anyway, so just go ahead and boycott them. And by boycott I mean do not buy, do not rent, and do not leech.
Being a student at a university next door to IU we also had problems with bandwidth usage. My freshman year bandwidth limitations were implemented to restrict data to 250megs a day, after that the download speed crawls. Even under modest use of surfing, listening to previews of music, the occaionsal porn and what not the limit is still reached even by those who didnt share files. Everyone protested this on campus and I believe the restrictions were removed.
The problem is, even with bandwidth restrictions, those with a little bit of know how easily get around them, there are no real solutions to this problem on campus's. If the students bandwidth is restricted, then it just gets routed through the schools servers itself, which of course are not bandwidth limited (for those of you under this type of tyranical bandwidth limit, there is a clue as to how to solve this problem). The only real solutions are the ones that are like Penn states implementation of actually giving the students an option.
Of course no awadays on campus the bandwidth isnt really used up so much by music, but more so by movies, but thats another topic.
Generally speaking, sharing files is illegal (copyrighted music, copyrighted movies, copyrighted software, etc). I think at this point, being proactive is equivalent to a thief complaining to the Better Business Bureau because the shop he steals from has put bars on the windows and security cameras in the corners of the shop.