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The Rice Thresher
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by TOMMY BELANGER THRESHER STAFF
The Department of Information Technology Services decided to shut off the ports of students who use MP3-trading software such as iMesh, Gnutella and Scour between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays. "The ban is in place for bandwidth reasons," Senior Systems Administrator Wyman Miles said. He said traffic from these programs significantly slowed the campus network. Miles said 98 percent of residential college network traffic goes off-campus. "Of that, about 50 percent is traffic on MP3-sharing software," Miles said. Off-campus traffic includes connections to the Web, other universities and MP3-trading sites used by software like Napster. About 49 percent of total Owlnet traffic came from MP3-trading programs. In response to complaints of network slowness, Miles proposed that students voluntarily curtail their use of MP3-sharing software to alleviate the network congestion during hours when the network is needed most for academic purposes. Miles said immediately after the proposal was announced in the April 14 issue of The Rice Thresher, students ignored it. "To be honest, until last Friday there was no significant change in traffic except at night," Miles said. "We actually saw a significant increase in MP3-sharing traffic at night." E-mail messages were sent through college listservs informing students of the ban and of the repercussions of ignoring it. Additionally, Owlnet Systems Administrators Ajeet Pai and Avinash Pinto answered questions at the Student Association meeting Monday night. Information Technology Systems decided to shut off the computer ports of students not abiding by the ban. "We have an automated system that shuts off the port," Miles said. Miles said they didn't want to ban all of the MP3-sharing programs outright like they did with Napster in January. "We took a very heavy-handed approach with Napster," he said. Instead, they wanted to take an approach advocating student responsibility. Pai, a Will Rice junior, said that if IT merely shut down the software from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., it would encourage people to constantly try whatever methods they could to trade MP3s instead of being aware of what behavior is permissible and what is not. Also, Miles said that in an environment of constantly changing software, technical blocks are just temporary solutions. He explained that there is a "market of extremely smart software" that may evolve within the year into MP3-sharing resources that "will probably use well-known services like the Web and we just won't be able to stop it." He said it would be virtually impossible to put a technical stop on MP3-sharing over a Web-based system. Miles said that areas of severe network traffic come to the attention of systems administrators, but the contents of the data being transmitted over the network is never examined, as per Owlnet policy. Pai said Owlnet isn't concerned with network traffic until it becomes problematic. "Basically, what people do on the network is not important to us until it starts to affect the usability of the network for other people," Pai said. IT began shutting down student ports Tuesday at 8 a.m. although the original plans were to shut them down Monday night. At press time, at least five ports had been shut down, Pai said. Before Tuesday, there were about 150 students whose ports would have been shut down, but when they were warned of the unacceptable software, almost all stopped. Those students whose ports were shut down showed a consistent pattern of significant and heavy usage of the software during daylight hours, Pai said. Pai said ports are generally locked until the student has had a chance to speak with an Owlnet administrator. If a student's port is accidentally locked, he or she can speak to an administrator to correct and explain the mistake. If the student repeatedly violates the daytime-usage ban, the port could be locked for longer periods of time or the student could be referred to University Court. Pai also mentioned that if a student tried to change ports with her roommate, the roommate's port would also be locked. This is possible, Pai said, because each computer has a unique hardware address. Napster remains completely inaccessible to students during all hours. "We initially banned Napster for bandwidth reasons," Miles said, explaining that he sees "no reason to enable Napster since it would just make the problem worse." The legality of trafficking copyrighted MP3s is not quite certain, Pai said. Owlnet's Acceptable Use Policy, signed by all students entering Rice, states that students are not allowed to distribute copyrighted material whether or not there is a copyright notice attached. Miles also said there has been a continuing trend of increasing traffic on MP3-sharing programs at night. "It would be nice if students go above and beyond what we've asked for," Miles said, although he also said that he doesn't expect traffic to decrease during the night hours. Information Technology Systems has also made a few significant modifications to Owlnet to alleviate traffic congestion. IT has installed a second Ethernet router link to Owlnet. "Originally, Owlnet had a single Ethernet link to the rest of campus. What we did last week was add another one," Miles said. He explained that the second Ethernet link "relieves connection performance between campus computers and Owlnet," splitting the traffic over both connections. Miles said IT has also created a private network for campus computers performing systems administration work. For example, Unix machines backing up their software late at night will neither be slowed by Owlnet congestion nor contribute to it. Both Miles and Pai agreed that although these improvements will help alleviate the problem, student cooperation is necessary. "We're trying to create an environment where people police themselves," Pai said. - back - |
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