twofo forum

echelon wrote:Well everyone I think the key here is to read their notice carefully.. ITS cleverly (and annoyingly) use a clever marketing technique to say one thing and imply something else!!

Not having blocked the other p2p apps and gaming does not mean they will work!! They simply put them on lowest priority ie terrible connection!! This means apps like DC++ will timeout and games will do the same!! Yet they have not lied in their statement!! very clever.. (and as I stated annoying!)

I would complain if I lived on campus this year!! Also I reckon a few of us CS students could quite easily create a better network especially if we had full working days to do so like ITS staff!! tho I reckon its not actually bad skills from ITS staff rather just bad management!! not sure this new ITS director knows what he/she is doing!! I say we get him/her FIRED!! lol

E wrote:I agree that the state of the network is apalling - web pages are slow to download, legal downloads (AOE III demo ) are slow, and all of the games I thought I would have been able to play online are just unbearable due to latency.

But what I find almost more uneblievable is that many of you seem to think that you somehow have a right to have access to P2P programs, apparently because they can be used for legitimate, legal sharing purposes...
Who are you kidding?
No doubt all of you have illegal uses of P2P programs in mind, and even if you don't, or can think of a legitimate reason as to why they should be allowed (seriously, can you?), the majority of others using them will use it for illegal purposes.
While I wouldn't mind access to them myself, I see it as perfectly fair of IT Services to disallow the use of such programs.

Well actually I could easily name P2P apps that are completely used for legal purposes.. Do u kno wat Skype is?? Yes indeed that is a P2P app.. n if u call that illegal I would prefer u never spoke again!! Its shameless to decided for users wat is acceptable and wat is not.. Ok sure certain apps like bittorrent are destructive for the network and I will have to agree that they should not be allowed.. (everything ppl use bittorrent for can be acquired elsewhere!!) I dont even use bittorrent anymore myself.. Dont like it.. its bad for the my own network too and I prefer to know who is downloading from me rather than all kinds of random ips accessing my network!

I disagree with you, I don't think anything should be banned, especially not bittorrent. If ITS are worried bout degredation of the network, then they can only allow BT after midnight or something. Bittorrent is the most reliable and fastest (not including DC++) to get the newest 'stuff'.

that is very well put! and i think more people should complain especially since skype is not allowed i would have thought more people would be concerned about it ?

Is it possible to set up a web page where all of us can put in our names and room numbers and put in our complaints?

Then we can submit that link to ITS.

I mean honestly - at this moment, Heronbank is having major slow downs.
Pages are timing out. Now hard is it really to sort out router issues?

Also, Skype is no way illegal!!! This is just bollocks. I am an international student and it is too expensive and unreliable to contact my folks back home, Skype makes it very easy. If they close or slow down Skype, that will be the last straw for me.

To be honest, I do not think the university administration even know of the problems on resnet.

Consider this:

Warwick ITS site:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/

has absolutely nothing on the resnet issues. Nothing!!!!

But ITS have cleverly disguised the resnet site at:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/ ... computing/

To get to this link is like finding a small stone in a marsh the size of Australia!

Anyway sorry for penting my frustrations. I can slap some one right now so hard!!!

Zizzi

I agree with you. For the past day, pages have been timing out like crazy over ResNet. The only thing that has made me look up a bit is this:

Thu 20th October, 13:00: The priority given to MSN Messenger traffic was increased

I've really noticed the difference too, at least now I can send and receive files. Before it (literally) didn't send or receive a single kilobyte, ridiculous. Also, using a webcam through MSN Messenger was physically impossibly before, but now seems to work slightly better.

I read that they increased the overall bandwidth of the entire university by 50%? I'm not totally sure that will be enough considering web pages alone fail to load occasionally...or perhaps they don't have the priorities set up right.

Phoenix wrote: I disagree with you, I don't think anything should be banned, especially not bittorrent. If ITS are worried bout degredation of the network, then they can only allow BT after midnight or something. Bittorrent is the most reliable and fastest (not including DC++) to get the newest 'stuff'.

Well allowing it only after midnight would leave maybe only 7-8 hours download time.. I reckon ppl would consequently complain more about this than just a pure ban. They would have their downloads interrupted and it would take several nights to maybe download somethin... depending on the speed...

The main reason why I say bittorrent should be banned is that it drains a lot on the upload speed. For u to download quick on bittorrent u need to be uploading a lot as well.. Thus u would get a massive bottle neck on the upload and this could prevent others uploading for other purposes. Also the general strain on the network is high with a lot of bittorrent clients. And lets face it.. If bittorrent was not banned a lot (maybe 25% of campus) would be using it.. And then the other services are sought after (like gaming) would suffer! If it was only 1-10 ppl using bittorrent the network most likely would not suffer and it wouldn't be worth the hassle yet no matter how fast a network u will have problems when a large proportion of users use it. Lets face it bittorrent is basicly a bandwidth whore! I like my freedom and to be able to get the newest favorite episode of somethin, but to do it at someone else's expense is not really fair. I often use exclusive ftp servers to get the newest stuff as its the available even b4 bittorent, but otherwise I use DC++ (mostly swedish hubs!)or IRC (yes u can actually get fairly reasonable speeds!)..

I think ppl should be calling ITS and stressing the point about skype.. Especially international students as they have an even stronger point as Zizzi points out:

Zizzi wrote: Also, Skype is no way illegal!!! This is just bollocks. I am an international student and it is too expensive and unreliable to contact my folks back home, Skype makes it very easy. If they close or slow down Skype, that will be the last straw for me.

ITS have to at least come with a reasonable response to that!

They havent blocked skype as yet.

Well echelon, would you like to share with us some of these ftp sites. I'd understand if you can't tho.

Edit: Just read up a bit bout these exclusive ftp sites. It appears that they are closed to but a priveiliged few. Where would us mere mortals get our 'fix' from then?

Hence that's why I suggest allowing BT or at least partially as it's the fastest and easiest method for transfering files. I wouldn't mind leaving a download on for a few nights and if it's allowed, I could prolly get it in one night anyway.

it's not likely to happen, but couldn't they 'allow' specific file sharing apps to work on a specific set of ports that are bandwidth limited to say 50KB/s and block it from all other unrestricted ports? 50KB/s is still a reasonable download speed, maxxed out you could recieve the 'latest' episode in about 2 hours or so,which should free up the network tremendously.

An 'allowed' DC hub with bandwidth limited to 50KB/s would put much less strain on the network than an unrestricted DC hub where you can download at almost maximum speeds, I managed about 8MB/s when twofo worked properly! i bet that killed it for everyone around me while i downloaded that file...

The problem is that ITS have now started trying to block p2p traffic etc. By doing this, they seem to have agreed that they can do things to curb the 'spread of illegal files', so it'd may be difficult to reverse their decision as they obviously have the means to do this 'protection'.

Cocodude

The problem with BT is that it uses an entirely different protocol as other filesharing applications. The DC protocol can have lots of people downloading on the network at ~10Mbps and no one would even notice, however just one person downloading at 15kbps on BT and it could potentially saturate the network because of overheads; it's got nothing to do with people uploading stuff.

BigG wrote:The problem with BT is that it uses an entirely different protocol as other filesharing applications. The DC protocol can have lots of people downloading on the network at ~10Mbps and no one would even notice, however just one person downloading at 15kbps on BT and it could potentially saturate the network because of overheads; it's got nothing to do with people uploading stuff.

Sorry, you've confused me here - what to do mean exactly? The way someone can connect to hundreds of peers and there being lots of TCP/IP overheard, but little throughput?

Cocodude

TCP/IP is a heavy weight protocol in that there's a lot of extra checks (forming a connection, synchronisation (i.e. out-of-order packets placed back in-order), different levels of sliding-windows (to maintain a steady flow of data), cyclic reduncacy checks, closing a connection etc etc etc) performed, before, during and after connections. While downloading a single file through BT you'll be maintaining 100s of these connections each of which will be uploading and receiving these extras, as well as the data itself. So as the number of students using BT increases on campus, the number of packets floating around the network will increase, most likely exponentially.

I'm not sure about the protocol that DC uses but because it's a direct connection none of these extra checks are required during the transfer, just the data... So at a guess, there's a "uniform" number of packets floating around the network!

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I wrote this based on a very basic knowledge of networking from a module I took 2 years ago! I'm sure you, CocoDude, have already acquired a lot more knowledge on the subject than I have!!!

I MISS DC++ !!!!!

Right, yes, I see what you mean now. I would have thought that many Bittorrent clients would be sensible enough to limit connections when it's not really getting much throughput though, as you could just be sending the extra information with very little payload!

When I was on campus, Bittorrent was unusable during the day, but when it got less busy during the night, I was on a few occasions, able to upload at 500KiB/sec (yes, 0.5 Mibibytes/sec). That was good - the Uni Internet connection had bandwidth to spare so the traffic shaper was doing its job nicely. There's nothing to stop Warwick from implementing this system again. In fact, I have a traffic shaper on twofo and when I'm sending out a large e-mail or something, my p2p traffic reduces to zero.

Cocodude

Scoobt wrote:TCP/IP is a heavy weight protocol in that there's a lot of extra checks (forming a connection, synchronisation (i.e. out-of-order packets placed back in-order), different levels of sliding-windows (to maintain a steady flow of data), cyclic reduncacy checks, closing a connection etc etc etc) performed, before, during and after connections. While downloading a single file through BT you'll be maintaining 100s of these connections each of which will be uploading and receiving these extras, as well as the data itself. So as the number of students using BT increases on campus, the number of packets floating around the network will increase, most likely exponentially.

Hundreds? Each machine in the resnet has always been limited to a maximum of 100 outbound connections, to reduce the impact of viruses. The standard bittorrent client will stop making new connections once it has established 40, on the default settings. Half way through last year outbound connections to the standard bittorrent port, 6881, were blocked, so bittorrent would typically be using 15 to 30 connections, for one busy torrent.

Scoobt wrote: I'm not sure about the protocol that DC uses but because it's a direct connection none of these extra checks are required during the transfer, just the data... So at a guess, there's a "uniform" number of packets floating around the network!

DC uses TCP/IP just like pretty much everything else, it just only uses one connection per transfer.

Phoenix wrote:Well echelon, would you like to share with us some of these ftp sites. I'd understand if you can't tho.

As I have already informed several users that sent me private messages asking pretty much the same thing.. I basicly dont have the influence inside the overall network to allow that. I have myself not been a big user lately as I have been particularly busy with other things. This automatically means my power/influence is reduced greatly. You would be surprised how quickly you loose influence.. but anyways to make a long story short.. I cant just invite several users into the network. I can give hits as to ways to enter some of the exclusive networks, but it takes time! No easy shortcuts.. sorry guys