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Port bandwidth restriction loopholes?

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Blindside

Registered
Joined
Oct 1, 2002
Location
Indianapolis
MY school places a MAJOR restriction on individual port bandwidth, or at least I think that's what's happening. P2P (to outside the local network) speeds are diminished or completely eliminated. Anyone know of a convenient "loophole" that I can use (proxies, etc....)? Typically I frown on any kind of cracking, but with 4 T1s serving 900 students, I would think my $28000/year would give me a little more. Thanks for your help.
 
Welcome to the forums.

Discussions on Hacking and/or Cracking is not allowed here. You should familiarize yourself with the forums rules. They can be found in the "Forum FAQs and Guidelines" or the Announcement at the top of every forum:
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/announcement.php?s=&forumid=16

Generally, P2P programs cause excessive network traffic, and when you throw the numbers together:
4 T1's = 1.544Mbits/second per T1 = 6.176Mbits/second

6.176Mbits/900 students = 0.006862Mbits/student = 6.862Kbits/student = 0.85775Kbytes/second/student

So, if you let everyone use peer to peer programs, how much of that 0.85KB/s per student allocation do you really think you'll have available to you when you want to do something ACADEMIC?

There are no loopholes for "lack of bandwidth".. oh i wish there were. If your network administrator doesn't allow P2P traffic, or severly limits it, then there's nothing you can do about it.
 
I concur with su root.

I'd also like to throw this in...
Having worked on the administrative side of a network, I can say that the ego trip given from completely shutting down an abuser is like few other things in the world. If you want more bandwidth ask your netadmin politely and with respect. If you want to **** them off and get in hot water, find that loop hole you're looking for, they'll find it too and probably clamp down on your access to an extreme extent.
 
Thanks for the constructive responses. I hope I didn't give the impression that I am out to screw my wonderful school by completely challenging "the man's" system (another topic for another day) and breaking into things that a lowly forum newbie and apparent complete idiot like myself has no business messing with.
 
I guess i'm not the only one with admin responsibilities that freaks on p2p issues.

The reason is :

1. they tend to use all the bandwidth
2. they are know to result into security issues
3. you can only control it by banning it


So the shouting probably came from the millions of times admins have to explain to users what the result of the innocent actions are.
 
you can also use things like Packeteer, that'll allow you to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for all P2P and fileshare program traffic. http://www.packeteer.com/

I wouldn't really tolerate P2P programs wasting bandwidth in a business environment. At school, you should have no place to install any programs and I would disable P2P traffic. For places like residence or dorms, I have seen many different solutions for it.

-Block all P2P traffic, and most other stuff too, incl. MSN and ICQ.. don't let you do anything but surf. (then this place let ICQ and MSN through)
-Reserve certain bandwidth for administrative use, and let everyone go nuts on bandwidth through the night (restict through the day)
-Packeteer all P2P traffic to a certain amount, over all users, anytime.
-Limit bandwidth per user per month, pay for more
-Limit bandwidth every few days (5Gigs/week)
-Limit throughput (not many places do this -- can't say "high speed internet access")
 
How quickly this thread turned into admin whining mayhem that is very detrimental to my cause. Goodnight and Goodbye.
 
Blindside said:
How quickly this thread turned into admin whining mayhem that is very detrimental to my cause. Goodnight and Goodbye.
Your view is that you don't get good speeds off of P2P programs. The administrators view is that P2P programs eat expensive bandwidth.
They're both the same problem.

Have you considered that you are detrimental to the administrators cause? (which is to provide equal network and internet access to all students for academic use?) You are trying to find loopholes and use more bandwidth than you are allowed... the exact opposite of their cause.

The only answer to this problem is to purchase more bandwidth for the collective. This isn't cheap. T1's are about $1000 CAN per month. 900 students over 1 year would have to pay about $15 each for 0.21Kb/s more. You were also complaining earlier that you were paying $28,000. Speaking of off topic, this could turn into a tuition discussion... tuition is too expensive as it is... would you pay $15 more for almost 0.21k/s more bandwidth? No! You want more for less. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
 
Network restrictions are there for a reason:

  • As you are in an educational institution, the main reason you have 6 T1 lines is for educational browsing, not for downloading stuff off of P2P programs.
  • It is difficult to control exactly what is downloaded via P2P programs. Viruses, pr0n, warez and other inappropriate content could be being downloaded. This, obviously, is not acceptable within an educational institution.
  • When using P2P programs it is likely that files will be big. MP3s are 3 Meg upwards, and video content will be larger. So while you are downloading several hundred megs of music other people are trying to work.

At the school I attend, we have about 200-something computers upwards. We have a 2Mbit connection to a gateway connected to a 100MBit internet connection. Thus our bottleneck is 2Mbits. This, when everyone is on the net, is unbelieveably slow.

It used to be 384k! And that was so slow I didnt use the net unless I had to.

At school we have the following restrictions:
  • P2P programs are blocked
  • We must login in before we get access to the internet
  • MSN/ICQ/YM/AIM/IRC/etc are all blocked
  • FTP access is blocked, except on the Administrators PC, which uses an FTP proxy. In theory someone could identify the ftp proxy and use it on other PCs. Except there are perhaps two people that ever use that PC. The Network Admin... and me :).

Without going on too long about this, dont try and bypass any security. You will get caught. Its no fun for you, for the network admin or for other network users. I sit next to the login server, proxy server and G4 server for 5 hours a week. A lot of the time the servers are left logged in as Admin. But what is the point? If I use other peoples internet access accounts then I will get found out. If I give myself Admin privelages then I will get found out.

The restrictions are there for a reason. Bypassing them (or attempting to) causes the Admin to tighten restrictions up and this spoils everyones fun.

Perhaps get cable or DSL at home for P2P?

David
 
If you are unhappy with your internet connection in residence, you may be able to install DSL or Cable internet. If not, and your phone lines are analog, then you can use dialup if you need P2P. With dialup you may get faster speeds on P2P programs than on the network. It also frees up the network for more legitimate purposes.
 
su root said:
-Limit bandwidth per user per month, pay for more

i hope yournot talking about students paying for more bandwidth at a school dorm...School's that have 900 students and 4 T1's should invest in a more competant internet connection imo

edit: read some other replies..just b/c your at a school dorm things like AIM/IRC etcetc. shouldnt be blocked.
 
PYROMANIAC said:


i hope yournot talking about students paying for more bandwidth at a school dorm...School's that have 900 students and 4 T1's should invest in a more competant internet connection imo

edit: read some other replies..just b/c your at a school dorm things like AIM/IRC etcetc. shouldnt be blocked.

University of Waterloo gives you 2 gigs per month. You pay if you go over it. They say it includes local traffic w/in the residence aswell, but I don't believe them. I feel sorry for my friend who lives there, 66 Megs per day isn't enough. the UT2k3 demo killed his bandwidth allotment for like a week and a half. He's looking at no bandwidth for 2 weeks if he tries to upgrade halflife. No online gaming for him.

Humber College recently locked down their network (due to recent hacking attempts), they locked down everything except http port 80.. no icq, aim, aol, etc. Nothing but web surfing. They loosened it up after 2 weeks IM programs get through now.

I feel sorry for both of my friends at Waterloo/Humber.. they both recently got off dialup and on to highly-restricted broadband :(
 
wow, i never knew all these restrictions existed at various colleges/universities, i sure hope my school doesn't do anything like that.

I don't know much about networking (okay, I'm a TOTAL NEWB in that respect) but our school has in place for this year a fiber optical gigabit backbone. all AIM/IcQ and P2p programs allowed, no limit on bandwith, connection speed with in the network and to the outside is awesome (download 700 megs in sub 3 minutes from another student on the network)

however, as was pointed out above, there are problems with this. one being the transger of illegal materials - the Movie Association or something recognized and warned our school (and some specific students i believe) because this university was like the world's or north america's 5th largest site the transfer of illegal DivX files and such...

... makes me wonder - they got that last year (when we had 145Mbit ATM lines) and so this year they 'reward' the students with 1 gigabit:D i'm not complaining though
 
Albigger said:
wow, i never knew all these restrictions existed at various colleges/universities, i sure hope my school doesn't do anything like that.

I don't know much about networking (okay, I'm a TOTAL NEWB in that respect) but our school has in place for this year a fiber optical gigabit backbone. all AIM/IcQ and P2p programs allowed, no limit on bandwith, connection speed with in the network and to the outside is awesome (download 700 megs in sub 3 minutes from another student on the network)

however, as was pointed out above, there are problems with this. one being the transger of illegal materials - the Movie Association or something recognized and warned our school (and some specific students i believe) because this university was like the world's or north america's 5th largest site the transfer of illegal DivX files and such...

... makes me wonder - they got that last year (when we had 145Mbit ATM lines) and so this year they 'reward' the students with 1 gigabit:D i'm not complaining though
My school is kinda the same.. they say we get T1-quality internet access, but it's a little bit more than that. Everything gets through, and so far there have been no big problems. I'm sure there are movies and illegal stuff floating around, but that can't be helped (if you try to block it, they'll just find another way). Most of the people @ my college aren't computer literate tho, so the hilite of their computer day is checking their email. Last I checked, my school has 11Mbits for everyone.. it's a little slow during the day due to school traffic and such, but during the night, when school is out, it is fast.

Albigger said:
that really sucks
Yes it does. I also had a friend at Sheridan college who (moved out and) had bandwidth restrictions at about 3Gigs/week, which isn't that bad for the normal web surfing she did, but as a media arts student, she was always streaming some sort of media. If you went over it you got a warning.. i'm not sure if you could buy more bandwidth or not..
 
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