The University of Florida is cracking down on peer-to-peer file sharing by dorm residents with a homegrown framework that automatically identifies P2P activity, isolates the nodes involved and initiates campus judicial proceedings based on university policy. Dubbed Icarus–short for the Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services–the framework has delivered enviable results since its launch at the start of the fall 2003 semester: recovery of 85 percent of the dormitory network’s scarce bandwidth.
Whose P2P?
First, let’s define our terms. P2P connections are prohibited under UF’s residence hall “no server” network policy. Some people mistakenly think that P2P sessions involve a community of peers working together with equal responsibilities–a serverless environment that would seem to exclude this class of application from UF’s policy. Although it’s true that P2P machines are peers, whenever one of those peers makes resources available to another, as it does when sharing an MP3 file, for example, that client machine becomes a server–a UF policy no-no.
Right Place at the Right Time
UF has 9,000 nodes connected at 100 Mbps on its housing network, including students and staff. The housing network is connected to the campus backbone via a gigabit connection, and all UF’s networks share an OC-12 link to the Internet. It doesn’t take much for 9,000 100-Mbps pipes to fill a 1-Gbps pipe–and, predictably, it didn’t take long for thousands of P2P machines to bring the housing network’s gigabit connection to its knees.
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