Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet

["Christopher E. Cramer" <chris.cramer () DUKE EDU>]

On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 09:50, Michael G Carr wrote:
> Would anyone who has seen (and dealt with or managed to track or
> curtail) BitTorrent and/or eDonkey/Overnet use care to share your
> experience and "best practices"?
>
> Mike Carr
> Univ of Nebraska   ********** Participation and subscription
> information for this EDUCAUSE Discussion Group discussion list can be
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We don't restrict or disable any P2P application at Duke (thank goodness
- have you tried to download Fedora from the mirrors :-)

That said, we were having bandwidth problems in the residence halls.  To
overcome that, we're using Cisco flow data to keep track of how much
bandwidth each IP address sends off campus within a given day.  Those
which exceed a certain threshold are sent a warning email telling them
how much bandwidth they've used, the average amount used in the dorms
and some general information on bandwidth being a shared resource.
Students who receive 5 such messages in the course of a semester are
restricted to 64 kb/s outbound for the rest of the semester.  Provisions
are made for folks doing academic work requiring huge amounts of
bandwidth, but so far, that case hasn't come up.  The large number of
tickets cut down on the complaints about students not knowing or hacked
machines, etc.  We can tell them that the original intent was 3 strikes,
but we went to 5 because of the types of problems they are complaining
about.

At the start of the Fall semester, we had approximately 250 Mb/s of
demand for outbound bandwidth (limited to 100 Mb/s).  After a semester
of running the notice/ticketing system we're down to 50-75 Mb/s of
demand.  The network seems speedier to the average student.  We're not
limiting usage based on content.  Overall, it's a big win for everyone.
A cheap, functional solution which is guaranteed to work regardless of
the protocol in use.  I highly recommend doing something like this.

-chris

--
Christopher E. Cramer, Ph.D.
University Information Technology Security Officer
Duke University,  Office of Information Technology
253A North Building, Box 90132, Durham, NC  27708-0291
PH: 919-660-7003  FAX: 919-660-7076  CELL: 919-210-0528
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