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Enabling Bittorrent at the University Level?
Sorthum asks: "I'm a network administrator for a small university (approximately 5000 students all told). We're running NAT in the dorms, which obviously restricts BitTorrent traffic. We do an annual student survey, on which 'Residential Network' is listed as the number 2 complaint. This translates more or less into 'Bittorrent is slow here.' My boss is in a frenzy to appease the users at virtually any cost, but it seems to me from my research that the only real way to improve Bittorrent speeds is to start assigning public IPs to the dorms. Add to that the potential liability of making a service that by most reports has upward of 90% of its traffic fall into a 'legally questionable' gray area, how can I win in this situation?"
BitTorrent, like any other technology, protocol, or tool, can be used for things that are legal, illegal, or questionable in various jurisdictions. Are you prepared to continue quashing a protocol or service simply because it may be abused?
On the other hand, almost all (or at least a great deal) of the BitTorremt traffic may be currently used for sharing copyrighted materials. We all know that to be the case. Is it responsible to open up the pipes for what you know is almost exclusively illegitimate usage, within the context of the law (regardless of how you or anyone else feels about copyright infringement, and so on)?
On yet another hand, what happens if BitTorrent usage becomes largely legitimate because some large legitimate service begins using it? (And yes, to those reading this, I'm more than aware BitTorrent is used for a variety of legitimate large downloads.) In that event, can you afford to continue treating any protocol or service as if it's illegitimate, just because some level of it is now?
During the heyday of Napster (1999-2000), UW-Madison estimated that Napster accounted for over half (!) of our inbound and outbound traffic. There was a lot of talk about how to deal with this. Ultimately, UW-Madison decided that as a large public research university, we can't afford to police a particular kind of traffic wholesale: any network protocol can be abused, used for illegal purposes, and so on. We felt that the academic arguments and responding to usage demands of the campus trumped making judgment calls about the appropriateness of the use. Granted, the appropriate use policy of the university forbade some of the things people were using the network for, but we didn't actively police (or restrict) traffic. In the end, this provided the university with the impetus to examine ways of meeting increased demand and come up with novel solutions to our neverending bandwidth needs. One interesting example is that we now locally host a collection of Akamai's servers on our own network, which serves UW-Madison, the 25 other UW System Schools, and WiscNet. However, some of the smaller schools couldn't afford to make those same determinations: they either restricted or blocked Napster (and other things, like Gnutella) completely.
Today, the university does shape and restrict traffic to the residence halls in various ways; but it's designed to do so in a way such that users almost always won't notice any impact and allows equal access for all. All of our residence halls feature 100mbit ethernet, and that full pipe may be taken advantage of. Some users do use the network for inappropriate purposes, and those cases are dealt with individually when needed. Still, there is no proactive policing unless there are clear abuse/misuse issues. For what it's worth, BitTorrent (and all other protocols) are fully usable here.
If you can afford it, politically and financially, I'd say you should be looking into opening this up. The school does not bear responsibility for the actions of its users unless there is a lack of good faith attempts to stop abuse when requested by, e.g., copyright holders. There always is the argument of customer satisfaction, as well, that must be responded to - whether some students' use is appropriate or not.
I know on small, home networks, many routers now support the Internet Gateway Device (UGD) protocol of UPnP, which allows dynamic configuration of port-forwarding for applications running through NAT. I'm not sure how well-suited the protocol is for large networks, but perhaps that's something you could consider?
i ce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Gateway_Dev
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Assess the need of services to provide to students, webmail, directory services, course pages etc.
Make the services available over net.
Kick residential networks completely away from university network.
Then you won't have to worry about what students do in their network, since it's operated by third party operator, not by university.
Third-party operators here are student unions etc, which partly/entirely own the housing which students rent,
and network policies are set at student level.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Give them public ip addresses, but make them dynamic, possibly make each user connect using PPoE, so there is a username and password, limit the bandwidth, block inbound windows SMB/LSH/NetBIOS ports such as port 139, 137 incoming to each user, etc.
Keep logs of what user logs in to what ip address. As an ISP you aren't responsible for the details of exactly they do online, you have no idea about the nature of their activities, or if they're legal or not: make sure you stay within the DMCA safe harbour, and clearly document the contact information as required, so the ISP can receive DMCA letters.
ISP responsibilities should be mostly met by being able to match an ip address to an individual who is responsible for that node.
If they mirror the linux distro, it'll download even faster. Perhaps they should figure out what students are downloading most (i.e. linux distros, game patches, movies that are in the public domain.. and keep local copies of those things. Once they learn of its existance, students will pretty much always go to the local cache for it's much much greater bandwidth and far lower latency.
They could even use mediawiki to allow the students to take some control of the cache.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I got a little box that would go between the phone body and the handset. This little box provided an analog phone jack. It had a way to adjust for 4 different power levels, to be set according to your digital phone. I think it needed a wall wart for power.
Procedure:
1. take handset off hook
2. tell modem to dial (any number will do)
3. dial the real number using buttons on the phone
4. enjoy the 9.6 kb/s connection