I2hub Shutdown Due to Legal Pressure

djabbour writes "I2hub, the only p2p client that catered to internet2 users has shutdown today due to legal concerns. A few hours ago, any user on i2hub got a message which read 'RIP 11/14/2005. It was a good run. Forced to shut down by the industry.' The i2hub site has been shutdown, and new clients can no longer login to the i2hub server."

Comments

Re:I'll certainly miss it.

[dknj]

Ugh ignore the crap spewn from most of the replies here. They are probably freshman/sophomore students who are doing "scientific tests" from their linux box plugged into a router in their dorm room. As an ex-employee of a major university (17,000+ students), I can tell you that it was not uncommon for us to pull 48Mbit/sec from other Internet2 hosts. From major service providers we'd usually pull somewhere around 16-20Mbit/sec. On a normal day we saw 15% utilization of our OC-3 connection. I2Hub, kazaa, and the like caught us off guard and raised our utilization to over 40%. Needless to say, the university president was not happy at shelling out extra money for additional bandwidth. This introduced each dormitory to a nice pipe of 10Mbit/sec with abusive users sent warnings and then losing their dormitory network access.

Now we have had major research projects go on where we have a solid 70Mbps transfer going with Cornell or some other major university for a week or so. In the name of research, its great. Sharing copywrited material? I think not. I made it a habit to send a stern warning to users about the implications of using p2p clients. When they did not heed my warning shots, I usually got them taken down on academic charges (its a bitch when you get kicked out of school for sharing the latest Britney Spear's album).

And for an idea of our infrastructure, we had fiber running between every building, 1000BaseT connections everywhere in the university (with the exception of dorms, which we had purposely limited to 100Mbit between rooms), Fiber between our SANs and major servers, and Infiband interconnect for our 224 node Linux clusters. Speed is definitely not an issue with universities, their budgets for hardware are insane (like a $1 million grant for computer equipment alone in one of their new buildings)

I'm sure there are other readers here who actually work for major networks who can share their stories as well.