http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/04/25/219257.shtml
Yep, they've gone and blocked all P2P sharing.
Is this something we do? For that, I refer you to the ResTek group since they're the ones handling that end of it.
From what I understand they're using quality-of-service methods to provide a disincentive for P2P. Regular traffic is set to a fairly low priority. Known-good traffic is bumped up, and known-good is fairly permissive. I know they regularly bump up game servers in priority. I have no idea what kinds of throughput bittorrent gets from their networks. They also run a caching proxy for HTTP traffic that is set to a very high priority in order to make normal web traffic run at a good speed (the downside of that is, of course, logging, which I know some students don't like).
And most importantly, ResTek's network is physically separate from WWU Campus. This was done before I got here, and is something I've come to appreciate. I have friends who work on a campus of about our size that has the res-net on the main campus link. Their bandwidth bill is much higher than ours thanks to that.
Yep, they've gone and blocked all P2P sharing.
Is this something we do? For that, I refer you to the ResTek group since they're the ones handling that end of it.
From what I understand they're using quality-of-service methods to provide a disincentive for P2P. Regular traffic is set to a fairly low priority. Known-good traffic is bumped up, and known-good is fairly permissive. I know they regularly bump up game servers in priority. I have no idea what kinds of throughput bittorrent gets from their networks. They also run a caching proxy for HTTP traffic that is set to a very high priority in order to make normal web traffic run at a good speed (the downside of that is, of course, logging, which I know some students don't like).
And most importantly, ResTek's network is physically separate from WWU Campus. This was done before I got here, and is something I've come to appreciate. I have friends who work on a campus of about our size that has the res-net on the main campus link. Their bandwidth bill is much higher than ours thanks to that.
Ugh. Discussions like that on slashdot make my head hurt. Too many armchair experts out there...Your description of how we (ResTek) do things is accurate. Our goal is to fill our pipe with traffic while conserving it as a usable community resource. I don't see us blocking P2P anytime soon, we've never out-and-out banned a filesharing protocol. (Besides... the evil bit RFC hasn't been widely adopted yet.) Managing QoS on P2P is easy at a technological level, but once institutional policies and thou-shalt-nots enter in, things get messy.Our bandwidth costs are getting bad... We're already at 70mbps, and saturating that (with no P2P) sunday nights, mostly with web traffic. We were able to secure better rates from our provider last year -- essentially they decreased their per megabit rates so we could purchase more, while keeping their total net profit about the same. We're looking at (aka hoping for) 80-100mbps for next year, assuming the money can be found somewhere. Nobody at restek likes logging student activity either... We've had internal discussions lately about rotating out logs that are heavy in student-activity after 24 hours or so. Proxy logs are rarely touched by human hands, and if they are, there is a very strong firewall between any log contents and student identity.
Oh, I forgot...Being on our own network has its advantages, we can form our own policies etc that work well for students in a residential environment while still having our core equipment managed by knowledgeable professionals. Very good trade-off there.But, it gets lonely on our island, and being a viewed as a pseudo-separate exo-campus entity isn't always productive.For example, our peak hours occur ~6pm-12am, when there is plenty of bandwidth available on the K20. If our proxy servers were multihomed on both networks with a sharing agreement, we could save five-figures a year. As it is now, those bits simply don't exist and the resource goes unused when the campus community goes home. But, because we're viewed as being so separate, as well as being self-funded, topics like this approach third-rail status, which is too bad.