Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet
From: "Christopher E. Cramer" <chris.cramer () DUKE EDU>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 10:01:30 -0500
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 found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/.
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 PGP Public Key: http://www.duke.edu/~cramer/cramer.pgp ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Discussion Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/.
Current thread:
- BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Michael G Carr (Feb 12)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Charlie Prothero (Feb 12)
- Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Dick Jacobson (Feb 12)
- Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Barros, Jacob (Feb 12)
- Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Daniel Adinolfi (Feb 13)
- Re: BitTorrent & eDonkey/Overnet Christopher E. Cramer (Feb 13)