Re: Researcher Activities

[Cal Frye <cjf () CALFRYE COM>]

Willis Marti wrote:
> How do y'all deal with faculty that want to do things like ICMP-scan the
> IPv4 address space? Or try out the next web crawler? Or enumerate http
> servers?

For some of these, we would try to educate them on the impact of their
project, and try to help them find alternatives or at least kinder
approaches to achieve their goals.

We got a complaint a little while back about one of our systems banging
on a national candidate's campaign web site. Turns out we have a
research project in Political Science that's collecting an archive of
all the candidates' web sites as the season progresses.

We worked with them to throttle back their crawler to a less aggressive
mode while still capturing the data they were interested in.

We also worked with our Dorm Energy Consumption research team to provide
a means to correlate a student's IP address with the Residence Hall and
floor of the student for their research and feedback (see this week's
Chronicle). Tricky, as we had to pull together three databases to get
the join they needed and then export just the relevant bits so they
never had personally identifiable information in their (less secure)
database. It would have been easier if we were way more heavily routed,
but what can one do?

Research, after all, is one of the reasons we're here. I figure my job
is to help them get that done without compromising something else.

--
Regards,
-- Cal Frye, Network Administrator, Oberlin College

   www.calfrye.com,  www.pitalabs.com


"Universalism struck hell from the theological menu; Unitarianism
removed original sin. --Forrest Church.