University LAN admins asleep at the wheel

[acemcmac]

I wouldn't wipe myself with this LAN it's been so bad since I moved in last September. It's frequently either knocked out by various virus attacks grinding the network to a halt or someone leaching so much that they are able to cause thousands of timeouts campus wide.

We have a 25megabit connection and a firewall that only restricts trafficflow across certain ports, aka

21, Kaaza and Bittorrent = Capped at .00001 Megabits each or something rediculously small (no more than 1 users worth)
5190 = 2 megabit cap
80 = priority for all bandwith

our SMTP has been out since last thursday and I just can't deal with this service quality anymore. Every admin from the top on down knows me by face now I've complained so much. I've even dissected the packets of the worst P2P programs and shown them which side to close which port on the subnet firewalls to end the P2P. With 3000 clients, I can't believe I'm the only one screaming.

Anyone else have to put up with crap like this?

I'm thinking of building a load balancing box with like 4 or 5 uplinks to the lan and adding a cable line or something... either that or I could deploy a survailiance box in each subnet and using remote desktop, find each leecher myself... any ideas???

BTW: we're a weekend ghost town, so LAN roxxors right now, I gaurenttee you that it'll be out by 8pm sunday

 

[attahoova]

same thing happens in my apt complex at college, our used to be constantly sucked down, then like your lan, they blocked kazzaa, BT - even FTP. They also replaced hubs with switched - I inferred this with what happened to my packet sniffing abilities.

Now every monthly virus knocks out the lan causing timeout after timeout. It got so bad at one point that they shut off everyones connection until you could print out proof of a virus scan report.


But it's still slow as sh*t, and I still get inbound packets from stuff as old as klez. only late at night when pc's are off and on weekends does it get fast. I've been thinking about talking to them about it, the IT guys are obviously idiots.

I think I'll just get a cable modem, only $25 a month for students here.

 

[Kadarin]

Nice to know your tuition fees go to pay for such incompetence, hmm?

 

[Batti]

You're not seeing the whole picture. IT on a campus is massively political. You cannot just block ports or viruses - that's considered impacting free speech by the clueless administration. It's amazingly difficult to do what would take minutes in the corporate world.

I work for the administration side of IT at a University. Imagine trying to get your finiancial data across those same wires infested by jackoffs downloading illegal materials and pr0n. There's a lot more going on than what you see in your room.

I do share your frustration, the general population believes the bandwidth is theirs to rape, with no consideration at all of anyone else. It's a sad testimony to the mindset of the college age...

:disgust:

 

[TourGuide]

It's a sad testimony to the mindset of the college age...

They figure it is bought and paid for in their tuition money I guess. The less tech oriented have no concept of shared anything.

 

[SaintGRW]

that sucks, network stability is one of the top things on my list when considering a college.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: acemcmac
I wouldn't wipe myself with this LAN it's been so bad since I moved in last September. It's frequently either knocked out by various virus attacks grinding the network to a halt or someone leaching so much that they are able to cause thousands of timeouts campus wide.

We have a 25megabit connection and a firewall that only restricts trafficflow across certain ports, aka

21, Kaaza and Bittorrent = Capped at .00001 Megabits each or something rediculously small (no more than 1 users worth)
5190 = 2 megabit cap
80 = priority for all bandwith

our SMTP has been out since last thursday and I just can't deal with this service quality anymore. Every admin from the top on down knows me by face now I've complained so much. I've even dissected the packets of the worst P2P programs and shown them which side to close which port on the subnet firewalls to end the P2P. With 3000 clients, I can't believe I'm the only one screaming.

Anyone else have to put up with crap like this?

I'm thinking of building a load balancing box with like 4 or 5 uplinks to the lan and adding a cable line or something... either that or I could deploy a survailiance box in each subnet and using remote desktop, find each leecher myself... any ideas???

BTW: we're a weekend ghost town, so LAN roxxors right now, I gaurenttee you that it'll be out by 8pm sunday

They're too busy worrying about Distributed Computing Clients.

 

[Sketcher]

Originally posted by: Batti
You're not seeing the whole picture. IT on a campus is massively political. You cannot just block ports or viruses - that's considered impacting free speech by the clueless administration. It's amazingly difficult to do what would take minutes in the corporate world.

I work for the administration side of IT at a University. Imagine trying to get your finiancial data across those same wires infested by jackoffs downloading illegal materials and pr0n. There's a lot more going on than what you see in your room.

I do share your frustration, the general population believes the bandwidth is theirs to rape, with no consideration at all of anyone else. It's a sad testimony to the mindset of the college age...

:disgust:

Roger that.

 

Originally posted by: Batti
You're not seeing the whole picture. IT on a campus is massively political. You cannot just block ports or viruses - that's considered impacting free speech by the clueless administration. It's amazingly difficult to do what would take minutes in the corporate world.

I work for the administration side of IT at a University. Imagine trying to get your finiancial data across those same wires infested by jackoffs downloading illegal materials and pr0n. There's a lot more going on than what you see in your room.

I do share your frustration, the general population believes the bandwidth is theirs to rape, with no consideration at all of anyone else. It's a sad testimony to the mindset of the college age...

:disgust:

At my school its not so much file sharing, its the gross incompatance by the students when it comes to viruses and updating windows. One of the techs lives on my floor, and you would not believe how many people say to him "virus? I never get a virus!" or "Windows update, what is that?" Sigh...its sad really.

 

[labrat25]

we never had problems in the dorms with file sharing... they'd yell at you if you download >Gb in 24 hours, but nobody noticed a slowdown

in my apartment the connection sucks... advertised T1 connection (ha!).. they have 1 T1 going on one of their buildings, the rest of us connect via a wireless connection (ie. we all share the connection)... the network craps out at least a couple times a week... the switched from DHCP to static IP because of the last round of viruses that crashed the network, but still this is crap

i've seriously considered getting a cable modem and taking that money out of my rent... see how quick they fix the connection then

 

[no0b]

at my college, the internet is pretty stable however they blocked all ICMP traffic and the standard irc ports. P2P is mostly blocked but its still possible to find programs that work. There is a large DC hub on campus intranet so theres not a big problem finding stuff. The subnets are behind different routers so UDP packets dont go farther than the subnet. A student made a UDP rebroadcaster that gets around the problem but its still annyoning as hell. We have a packet shaper that causes you to lag severly in online games every 10 minutes for about 30seconds. Its impossble to keep a stable connection to game servers. The student neighbor hood is circa 1999 with 10Base hub, (fvcking hubs). Hopefully by august they will have upgraded the student neighborhood to 100base switched and given the students a seperate pipe for internet connection that will be about twice as fast. Virii run rampant if you reinstall windows and connect it to the network you WILL get a blaster within 20 seconds. The IT department is very slow to act on poeple who have viruses that are pounding the network.

Other than that everything is peachy.

 

[acemcmac]

Well, I can really do anything I want here... I can launch my own counter-survailance system and find these jackoffs myself 24/7... something the university has trouble enough doing M-F, 8-5... or I can counter crap on it with a bandwith agregation server and mix in cable.

I don't even understand how one kid can pull enough band to bring down the network? we have traffic quotas on every port!!!

Edit: Hell, we dont even have a packet shaper or any form of QOS to speak of!

 

[FoBoT]

change schools

 

[acemcmac]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
change schools

Why, I get this one for free.

Oh, and I have the complete campus wide network diagrams with switch model numbers , hardware adresses and passwords if theres anything I can do of use from there... Ideas?

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: SaintGRW
that sucks, network stability is one of the top things on my list when considering a college.

Sorry, but thats one of the stupidest considerations in choosing schools I've ever seen. While important to getting work done and being able to relax, I would hardly consider it a top priority...

 

[martind1]

See you kids think that the cmapus network is a right. You knwo what, it isn't.

Think of it like the school gym. IT'd be great if there were enough raquetball courts for everyone but those cost money. So sometimes you have to wait.


Perhaps if the internet was sucha major concern for you, then maybe you should've done more research on the schhols network befroe you decided up on the school.


There are ways you can go about getting yoru situations fixed. Go talk to IT to find out who controls the decisions. Maybe its the dean, maybe its a smaller group. Go talk to them to try to find a solution that works for everyone.


Hey if you want to use it for file sharing, good luck cause you will be har pressed to find a shcool that doesn't have a HUGE problem with file sharing killing their network connection. I don't feel bad for people not being abel to leech off the network I use so they can download a bunch of movies.

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: martind1
There are ways you can go about getting yoru situations fixed. Go talk to IT to find out who controls the decisions. Maybe its the dean, maybe its a smaller group. Go talk to them to try to find a solution that works for everyone.

This is a really good idea actually. We had a similar problem at my college, and a bunch of us techies organized a meeting with our IT staff and management to see what they were going to do, and good things came out of it.

 

[martind1]

Ya, same with us. We ended up getting a package shaper as a short term situation which enabled us to keep the network up and runnign and web pages loading.

Long term benefits came out of it as well. They outlined plans to improve the campus wide network. Mostly with the internet connections. I believe they also worked out a plan to give kids the options of signign up for road runner as well.


If it s areal problem ,and if you care about yoru school, you should try to help them.

 

[martind1]

Originally posted by: buleyb

Originally posted by: SaintGRW
that sucks, network stability is one of the top things on my list when considering a college.

Sorry, but thats one of the stupidest considerations in choosing schools I've ever seen. While important to getting work done and being able to relax, I would hardly consider it a top priority...

I agree. How can it be your top priority? That makes no sense. Its for years of your life, you dont need to be so dependent on a network for leechign.


Find otu about the programs and if the school has connection to the field youa re interested in.

 

[acemcmac]

I'm on a first name basis with every admin on the whole campus, hasn't helped a thing.

This has nothign to do with waiting my turn. It is the god mandated responsibility of the admins to beat the snot out of people who defy the terms of use agreement, which includes not using the LAN in a way that impedes others use of it. This includes being a bandwith hog.

I'm sorry, but if you're running a server on 5190 and you kick 400 people off of AIM as a result, you deserve to be punted from the network. Anything less is dereliction of duty by the admins. :mad;

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: acemcmac
I'm on a first name basis with every admin on the whole campus, hasn't helped a thing.

This has nothign to do with waiting my turn. It is the god mandated responsibility of the admins to beat the snot out of people who defy the terms of use agreement, which includes not using the LAN in a way that impedes others use of it. This includes being a bandwith hog.

I'm sorry, but if you're running a server on 5190 and you kick 400 people off of AIM as a result, you deserve to be punted from the network. Anything less is dereliction of duty by the admins. :mad;

Comparing this post with your other thread complaining about the college network, I don't see you as solving any problems, but being one of those bandwidth hogs yourself.

And knowing the admins and having a meeting with people who sign their checks is a different matter. Management may not realize what is going on, or the severity of it.

 

[AFB]

Originally posted by: acemcmac
I wouldn't wipe myself with this LAN it's been so bad since I moved in last September. It's frequently either knocked out by various virus attacks grinding the network to a halt or someone leaching so much that they are able to cause thousands of timeouts campus wide.

We have a 25megabit connection and a firewall that only restricts trafficflow across certain ports, aka

21, Kaaza and Bittorrent = Capped at .00001 Megabits each or something rediculously small (no more than 1 users worth)
5190 = 2 megabit cap
80 = priority for all bandwith

our SMTP has been out since last thursday and I just can't deal with this service quality anymore. Every admin from the top on down knows me by face now I've complained so much. I've even dissected the packets of the worst P2P programs and shown them which side to close which port on the subnet firewalls to end the P2P. With 3000 clients, I can't believe I'm the only one screaming.

Anyone else have to put up with crap like this?

I'm thinking of building a load balancing box with like 4 or 5 uplinks to the lan and adding a cable line or something... either that or I could deploy a survailiance box in each subnet and using remote desktop, find each leecher myself... any ideas???

BTW: we're a weekend ghost town, so LAN roxxors right now, I gaurenttee you that it'll be out by 8pm sunday

Hey, arent you the one who was asking about cable internet.

 

[sdemaio]

Yeah, when I was at school the network was horrible. And it wasn't cause we didn't have enough bandwidth. We had bandwidth coming out our arses. It was just so many users, P2P and other stupid stuff that it ground to a halt. My gaming life suffered greatly, I couldn't play BF without 500+ pings. I cried.

 

[martind1]

Originally posted by: sdemaio
Yeah, when I was at school the network was horrible. And it wasn't cause we didn't have enough bandwidth. We had bandwidth coming out our arses. It was just so many users, P2P and other stupid stuff that it ground to a halt. My gaming life suffered greatly, I couldn't play BF without 500+ pings. I cried.

yes and gaming is the top priority of all academic network admins.


How dare they make your gaming life suffer? Maybe the pings are better in the library ...