Northeastern University, birthplace of Shawn Fanning’s Napster, is turning on its grandchildren. This is an notice put out by the IS department:
“In addition to a number of network configuration and administration changes, the fundamental change leading to today’s level of service was the blocking of several peer-to-peer applications (KaZaA, Morpheus, and less notably, Gnutella). These tools have two troublesome characteristics. The first is that they demand a tremendous portion of our Internet connection (90% peaks in late September). The second, and a much more troubling characteristic, is that when we attempt to limit, vs. block, the amount of resources available to KaZaA and Morpheus, they respond in a way that crash our networks.
The first problem can be addressed with more capacity (see below). The second problem makes them unacceptable until they are re-written to operate on large, complex networks like Northeastern’s or we can implement a way to manage them in a responsible manner. We have contacted the authors of these tools directly and, while they confirmed their tools’ behaviors, they are unable to offer a solution at this time. We will continue to work with them as well as seek other ways to provide these tools in a manageable way but, until that goal is achieved, they will remain blocked. Gnutella will be unblocked, but constrained in terms of the percentage of capacity available for its use, as soon as more capacity is available.
Today we are fully utilizing our Genuity-supplied T3 (45 megabit maximum) connection to the Internet to support NUnet and ResNet. We have asked Genuity to upgrade that connection to OC-3 (155 megabit maximum with 100 megabit initially available). This requires a new physical connection from campus and will take 4-6 weeks to install. Additionally, we will be upgrading a number of on campus network components to take advantage of the increased connection capacity.
This increase in capacity is both warranted and expensive. Even with more than doubling our connection capacity, it remains a finite resource. NUnet and ResNet’s primary purpose is support of academic, research, and administrative activity and other uses are secondary. We ask each member of the University community to use these services according to that priority and to use them responsibly. We will continue to monitor resource utilization (capacity used, not content accessed) by network address and will contact individuals who are using a disproportionate amount of network resources.
We will keep you informed as we roll out these service improvements over the coming weeks. If you are interested in reviewing prior communications on this topic or the Northeastern University Appropriate Use Policy relating to technology resources, please visit http://www.help.neu.edu.
Thank you for your continued cooperation and patience.
Bob Weir
Vice President, Information Services
617-***-****, bob****@neu.edu”
Notice how they don’t automatically consider p2p bad, they just want people to be responsible with it so when I need to do research at 3 am the god-damned connection is working!
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