Thursday, November 8, 2001

New limits placed on network access
By Jordan Blum
Staff Reporter

Information Services officials said there have been problems with network congestion because they have had to take steps to limit the amount of network connections for each user during the past three weeks, but they said students only have themselves to blame.

Dave Edmondson, assistant provost for Information Services, said a minority of students were saturating the network firewall when they used file-transmission software that opened up approximately 2,000 file-sharing sessions, or connections, at once from a single user.

“There’s 2,000 sessions trying to go through our firewall all at one time and it just completely saturated it,” Edmondson said. “What we’ve done is cut down on the number of simultaneous sessions a user can have per (Internet protocol) address.”

Edmondson said only the network connection is being limited and no sites or software were being blocked from students, as was the case with Napster two years ago.

William Senter, manager for Technical Services, said the firewall serves as a gateway for the network and it started experiencing problems when more than 50,000 total sessions were trying to fit through the firewall at once.

He said some students were using download accelerator software and it was opening thousands of sessions from their computers at once without them realizing it.

“The firewall technical support team was shocked when we told them we were in the 40,000 to 50,000 range of simultaneous sessions,” Senter said. “So what we’ve done is . . . cut down to about 100 simultaneous sessions per address. We’ve tweaked it and raised it a little bit since then too.”

He said a prioritization system keeps users from having problems with basic Internet applications like web browsing and e-mails.

“If you’re just going to CNN.com or Yahoo.com, you’re going to the highest priority of the bandwidth,” he said. “But if you’re downloading music or a file you’ll be at the low end. If the bandwidth is there you’ll get it, but there’s limits in place to keep things from getting out of hand.”

However, senior finance major James Gifford said it’s not fair for students not to be able to fully access the network when they are not given the chance to provide any input.

“I can understand the network being regulated from nine to five during the week, because I know teachers and graduate students had problems doing stuff in the past,” Gifford said. “But how busy can the network be at 2 a.m. on a Monday night when I can’t get online and play a game if I want to?

“I just don’t like regulation in general,” he said. “How much are students paying a year to go here? Our money goes toward a nice network system and they don’t even ask our input.”

Gifford said Information Services needs to reach out to the student body more often to improve communication.

“When the network goes down for a while, how hard would it be for them to send a campus-wide e-mail saying sorry for the inconvenience and briefly explain what happened,” he said. “It’d be nice if they’d let students know when they make changes to the network and increase regulation.”

Senter said there has been little communication with students about recent network problems because the network is still being worked on. He also said the network problems are part of a complicated subject that can’t be easily explained in a brief e-mail.

Edmondson said it’s probably time for him to schedule a meeting with student government to discuss the problems and changes the network has undergone. However, he said it is impossible for him to discuss every conflict with students before taking action.

“When we have a network slowdown we have to make adjustments,” Edmondson said. “We can’t just sit here and wait for a meeting and say let’s all take a vote on what we’re going to do. It’s just part of our job to manage the resources available.”

Edmondson said the university is working to remedy network congestion by spending approximately $240,000 a year on the network and by doubling the total bandwidth virtually every year.

Senter put the problem into context.

“It seems no matter how much bandwidth gets put out there for the students to use, they just use that much more and continue to saturate the firewall,” he said.

Jordan Blum
jdblum@student.tcu.edu