Rant: My univ. connection SUX

[SarcasticDwarf]

First off, I wouldn't be so pissed about this if they had said this was the case BEFORE I moved 2,000 miles to go to this crappy school (Univ. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh).

Port 25 blocked (you can't send e-mails from Outlook or anything similar, has to be through webmail)
ports ~6667-7xxx blocked - IRC
Maximum of 1gb (midnight to midnight) in a 24 period w/a max of 500mb upload
Steam ports are blocked (can't play Half Life: Conterstrike, Day of Defeat, Firearms, etc)
All file sharing ports are blocked (Bittorrent, Kazaa network, etc).
Just that I have noticed, the network has gone down in the past 3 days at the folllowing times requiring a reboot (ipconfig commands don't help):
02-07-04 12:50
02-07-04 17:10
02-08-04 14:15
02-08-04 16:56
02-08-04 22:00
02-09-04 11:36
02-09-04 16:03
02-09-04 19:06
02-10-04 13:45
02-10-04 21:08(5 minutes ago)
And worst of all, the firewall is slow incredibly slow, that when trying to access my website to develope it, I generally max out at 200 BYTES a second (if it does not time out altogether)





So anyway, I have been sending a pissed off e-mail every day for the last week. The last e-mail threatened to use my school e-mail account to send out the 150+ mailings for my website). Finally, today, I got the following e-mail:

I'm the manager of the MIO. I would like to setup a time for us to meet and talk about your recent requests for network connectivity.
Let me know when is the best time to meet and talk about this.

thank you.

 

[Warthog912]

From such a large School, that is incredible that it is locked down that harshly...

/sarcasm
Incredible I tell you.
/sarcasm

If I were you, I'd transfer to the nearest college that had a uncapped fat pipe-

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: Warthog912
From such a large School, that is incredible that it is locked down that harshly...

/sarcasm
Incredible I tell you.
/sarcasm

If I were you, I'd transfer to the nearest college that had a uncapped fat pipe-

that would be >sarcasm> and </sarcasm>

And it is frigging ridiculous. If I can get them to allow my site through the firewall and allow Steam through, I can probably get by without everything else.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

in fact, I have considered purchasing uwoshsucks.com, but I would spend 10 minutes waiting for every page to load while developing it.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

so, yeah

 

That sucks - I used to get 6 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up when I was in the dorms at U-M.

Good luck with your meeting though...hope something gets figured out.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

damn, that sucks

Have a :beer:

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: AgaBooga
damn, that sucks

Have a :beer:

I fing wish, 1 more year to go

 

[amdskip]

Ours sucks too. Everything like the routers, switches, wiring is like 7 years old and nothing has been upgraded as the school currently does not charge a fee for internet in the dorms = no money. Many times such as now we reach 56k speeds and I've seen 4000 up/down when theres hardly anyone hooked up to the campus. Why can't you use the schools mail server for outlook (just the sending one), thats what we have to do here. There is no gaming online here and downloading any large files takes days. I'm glad we don't have a bw limit but I doubt I'd reach it anyways with these speeds we have.

 

[PoPPeR]

I was at UC Davis this past weekend, where my friend, at 2 in the morning, was getting a healthy 12kbps from ebaumsworld. He said he contacted an administrator when he couldn't even log onto UC Davis's student resource or whatever and the administrator replied "I-Tunes is killing our network!"

When I heard that, I told him UC Davis must be I-Tune's biggest customer then if enough people are buying the songs 24/7 and depleting Davis's connection that badly.

 

[ViRGE]

I'm not in much better shape; our packet shaper has the same things blocked, and we run out of downstream bandwidth during the middle of the day. If it wasn't for the fact that we don't have a bandwidth cap, and I know a few tricks to make file sharing work even with the shaper, I'd go crazy. I still miss my games, too.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Ours sucks too. Everything like the routers, switches, wiring is like 7 years old and nothing has been upgraded as the school currently does not charge a fee for internet in the dorms = no money. Many times such as now we reach 56k speeds and I've seen 4000 up/down when theres hardly anyone hooked up to the campus. Why can't you use the schools mail server for outlook (just the sending one), thats what we have to do here. There is no gaming online here and downloading any large files takes days. I'm glad we don't have a bw limit but I doubt I'd reach it anyways with these speeds we have.

The school doesn't have any SMTP server that I know of. Even if they did, I would not be allowed to use it. I currently sent e-mails at least once a week to 150+ people, and need to send an e-mail to ~3,500 people next week. I COULD do that using my own webserver's SMTP server but it is blocked along with everything else. Webmail can NOT handle that kind of usage.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
I'm not in much better shape; our packet shaper has the same things blocked, and we run out of downstream bandwidth during the middle of the day. If it wasn't for the fact that we don't have a bandwidth cap, and I know a few tricks to make file sharing work even with the shaper, I'd go crazy. I still miss my games, too.

oh, they don't block 27015 to be used for playing CS, but they block all the ports Steam uses to update. So, as soon as there is a new update (yesterday), you need to drag your box to a friends house for the 100k update.

 

[Mookow]

Originally posted by: amdskip
Ours sucks too. Everything like the routers, switches, wiring is like 7 years old and nothing has been upgraded as the school currently does not charge a fee for internet in the dorms = no money. Many times such as now we reach 56k speeds and I've seen 4000 up/down when theres hardly anyone hooked up to the campus. Why can't you use the schools mail server for outlook (just the sending one), thats what we have to do here. There is no gaming online here and downloading any large files takes days. I'm glad we don't have a bw limit but I doubt I'd reach it anyways with these speeds we have.

The first University I went to, 300KB/sec from a fast server was something to complain about. My current university, I've pulled ~1MB/sec, though it is hard to find a server that fast on the Internet. Oh, did I mention the 802.11b coverage across the entire frigging campus? You could pull 500KB/sec while taking a dump.

Neither of them were overly anal about port restrictions, but both do limit FTP and P2P ports.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

I don't complain too much about IRC being blocked along with P2P access, which I would be using mostly for illiegal purposes anyway. What pisses me off is I can't even do legit work from my dorm.

 

[Gyrene]

Originally posted by: DeathByAnts
First off, I wouldn't be so pissed about this if they had said this was the case BEFORE I moved 2,000 miles to go to this crappy school (Univ. of Wisconsin, Oshkosh).

Port 25 blocked (you can't send e-mails from Outlook or anything similar, has to be through webmail)
ports ~6667-7xxx blocked - IRC
Maximum of 1gb (midnight to midnight) in a 24 period w/a max of 500mb upload
Steam ports are blocked (can't play Half Life: Conterstrike, Day of Defeat, Firearms, etc)
All file sharing ports are blocked (Bittorrent, Kazaa network, etc).
Just that I have noticed, the network has gone down in the past 3 days at the folllowing times requiring a reboot (ipconfig commands don't help):
02-07-04 12:50
02-07-04 17:10
02-08-04 14:15
02-08-04 16:56
02-08-04 22:00
02-09-04 11:36
02-09-04 16:03
02-09-04 19:06
02-10-04 13:45
02-10-04 21:08(5 minutes ago)
And worst of all, the firewall is slow incredibly slow, that when trying to access my website to develope it, I generally max out at 200 BYTES a second (if it does not time out altogether)





So anyway, I have been sending a pissed off e-mail every day for the last week. The last e-mail threatened to use my school e-mail account to send out the 150+ mailings for my website). Finally, today, I got the following e-mail:

I'm the manager of the MIO. I would like to setup a time for us to meet and talk about your recent requests for network connectivity.
Let me know when is the best time to meet and talk about this.

thank you.

Please, save it. We get a top speed of 5KB/s, file sharing ports blocked, inability to use any mail client other than webmail, inability to use AIM, constantly being kicked off in addition to the 8PM-8AM downtime for scheduled maintenance, plus the mass amounts of viruses rampaging across the network. You don't know bad.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: DeathByAnts

Originally posted by: amdskip
Webmail can NOT handle that kind of usage.

Are you takling about web-based email, or just regular webmail?
....at least the peoplesoft implementation I've used worked fine.

 

[apac]

Wow, I feel for you. MY friend at cornell has it worse though, 4gb of bandwith a MONTH. That includes web browsing, etc.

I on the other hand love my 5mbit no holds barred connection .

 

[helpme]

The packet shaper here at Cal Poly Pomona takes care of P2P filesharing, but ignores NNTP

 

[n0cmonkey]

Wow, glad I went to a college when it was about getting pissed and laid instead of how much pr0n I can download in a day.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I make sure I have shell access somewhere to keep me chatting

 

[Anubis]

sounds like my school.

kazaa runs at 5k/s
Bt is blocked, so is IRC and just about everything else
bandwidth is limited for each student. max dl speed on teh student side is 100k/s while the academic buildings get 500k/s+
we only have 12 megs of webspace and email eated into it
outlook does work however, BUT only from on campus, you cant use it from off campus, you need to use webmail
at certian times it slows down to 56k speeds
they dont allow you to have a wireless router because its a security risk
most of teh labs have sh!tty imacs in them or p3s running winME

however we run a direct connect Hub which is cool, only internal so they let it slide about 1.5TB on there most times