[ale] (OT) schools and filesharing

[Dan Newcombe]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, John P. Healey wrote:
> One word:  Firewall.

You're kidding right?

Sure...you can put a firewall in place.  Now, since most P2P apps jump
around ports like crazy, do you just block everything? or take the
attitude that Web=Internet?  IIRC, if all else fails, Kazaa runs over port
80. What's the point of having an academic network if you can't use it to
learn?  If you shut down everything then you are limiting students to just
web browesing...so much for creating new tools, etc..

What we have done is put a packetshaper in place.  All P2P traffic for the
whole campus is limited to 28.8kbps.  It doesn't matter if they are
pulling down movie rips, illegal mp3's or perfectly legal mp3s.  We have a
limited amount of bandwidth that gets used for administrative and academic
purposes.  If this work can not get done because the P2P traffic is
constantly using all the traffic, then again, what is the purpose of
having the network connection?

I think this is a band-aid.  Before long someone is gonna get smart and
Kazaa will run over 443 via SSL, and then it'll look just like any other
web traffic and be a nightmare to try and filter on.