You will make yourself crazy trying to find and plug every hole.
There are a couple of stock answers to your problem and well as a solution.
One thing is to try to figure out some good educatioanl uses for P2P and Instant messaging. This technology is part of the culture of the students so to try and stop it is impossible and not a good use of your time. As educators we have to turn this to our advantage. We use chats in class to have discussions--it is amazing how a student who is shy and afraid to speak in class with have something rich and substantive to say in a chat. We also use file sharing to swap materials. So use the techonology!
That said, we do face the fact that our incoming bandwith is not unlimited nor free. We had a real problem with our line being saturated with students downloading music. Doubling our capacity did not solve the problem either. We subscribe to online resources that we couldn't use because of congestion. Our philosophy is that as a school we guarantee the bandwith for legitimate educational purposes and anything leftover is for anything else.
I discovered a device that shapes bandwith from a company called Packeteer. It is called Packetshaper and with it I can very, very easily allocate bandwith by application. For example, for P2P I can limit the total available bandwith to say, 56K. So all the remaining bandwith is available for whatever we want. Also, if I wnat to guarantee that e-mail gets all the bandwith it needs I can easily specify that.
It is a terrific solution that works. I tried other things including blocking ports at the router, but that just swamped the poor router.
steve
Slashdot Mirror
You will make yourself crazy trying to find and plug every hole. There are a couple of stock answers to your problem and well as a solution. One thing is to try to figure out some good educatioanl uses for P2P and Instant messaging. This technology is part of the culture of the students so to try and stop it is impossible and not a good use of your time. As educators we have to turn this to our advantage. We use chats in class to have discussions--it is amazing how a student who is shy and afraid to speak in class with have something rich and substantive to say in a chat. We also use file sharing to swap materials. So use the techonology! That said, we do face the fact that our incoming bandwith is not unlimited nor free. We had a real problem with our line being saturated with students downloading music. Doubling our capacity did not solve the problem either. We subscribe to online resources that we couldn't use because of congestion. Our philosophy is that as a school we guarantee the bandwith for legitimate educational purposes and anything leftover is for anything else. I discovered a device that shapes bandwith from a company called Packeteer. It is called Packetshaper and with it I can very, very easily allocate bandwith by application. For example, for P2P I can limit the total available bandwith to say, 56K. So all the remaining bandwith is available for whatever we want. Also, if I wnat to guarantee that e-mail gets all the bandwith it needs I can easily specify that. It is a terrific solution that works. I tried other things including blocking ports at the router, but that just swamped the poor router. steve