[PLUG] Re: New to Purdue/PLUG

[Will Andrews]

[  WARNING:  Acidic content.  Don't read if your eyes burn.  ]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 08:51:22PM -0500, Robert Woods (woodsrw@purdue.edu) wrote:
>          - 2nd semester, something took a shit and our network sucked.. 
> someone at resnet was talking about a connection to internet2 being 
> down.  I am not quite sure, and am not all to informed on what hardware 
> they are running, and especially what i2 connections they have-- but i know 
> they still have some sort of conn to the other campuses.

I2 always worked.  Some (l)users on campus complained to PDN that
ResNet was taking all their I2 bandwidth, even though PDN
throttled the total 128.211.* traffic on it to about 5-10Mb/s.  I
suspect that if they gave ResNet users back that access, things
would become nicer.  But I don't know if the I2 b/w is more
expensive than the UUNet b/w, or whether PU is charged a flat
rate for their connections or per average Mb/s or whatever.   So
depending on whether I2 is cheaper or not, PDN might be making a
mistake not giving ResNet direct access to it.

> i have no idea why they are having problems.

Because lusers are abusing the bandwidth and d/ling more than
their fair share of the internet traffic.  I've heard reports
that last year 4-5 guys used up 85% of the ResNet UUNet bandwidth.
Gee, thanks a lot, those guys!  Why don't you pay 85% of our
ResNet bills so you pay your share?  :)

On a side note, one reason things have changed a lot since the
1st semester last year is the growing popularity of node-oriented
P2P programs like Gnucleus, BearShare, Morpheus, Audiogalaxy, and
all those things.  They waste a lot of bandwidth just querying
for music and stuff.  There's a paper about Gnutella's
unscalability somewhere (written by a (former?) Napster
employee), and some of the numbers are pretty surprising.

Compared to Napster, Gnutella-based clients are very network I/O
inefficient.. but you don't expect the average luser to know
that, right?  They just click and download their fav songs or the
latest 2-hour pr0n movie.  I don't need to mention how the actual
fetching of illegal material wastes even more b/w, right?  ;)

> To the prev. response, doug wrote that we should pay more for this conn., 
> well, i've done the figures, I worked for an isp up north-- purdue receives 
> plenty of money for the bandwidth, along with funding from the 
> govt.  Purdue is not a business, they are here to help educ, so they get 
> discounts on bandwidth.  Who knows why our bandwidth sucks now.

You're on crack.  Decent bandwidth costs plenty of money (on the
order of $600-1000 per Mb/s per month), and figure loop charges
(y'know, Chicago is 110 miles northwest of here and Indianapolis
about 65 miles southeast -- that's a lot of fiber ;), routers,
people to make them work, and all that.  Gee, that big mound of
money reshall people give them doesn't look so big, now does it?

-- 
wca