Junior Tara Forman just wants her AIM back.
“It won’t let you sign on, and it’s frustrating because it’s the easiest way to keep in contact with people,” said Forman. “I feel out of the loop when it’s not working, which is about 70 percent of the time.”
Forman, like many students at Washington University, crawled out of bed last weekend only to find that the instant messenger service failed to launch.
Matt Arthur, director of Network systems and Operations, explained that they have discovered the causes of the connectivity issues that have been plaguing students like Forman.
“There’s been a couple problems. One is there are switches in the network that are basically turning themselves off, which can cut connectivity. Yesterday afternoon we found what we think the problem is and will be working to implement that solution,” said Arthur.
“The bigger problem is, at some level, the same problem we’ve seen in years past. ResTech has 65 Megs of guaranteed bandwidth to the Internet. The connectivity problems shouldn’t be arising when you access stuff on campus-that is a fast Ethernet connection, and hasn’t seen any problems. When we look at our straight raw traffic, at about 4 p.m. every day it flat lines until 1 a.m. in the morning. More than 65 Megs is trying to get crammed through this pipe,” continued Arthur.
Once the network caps out on its bandwidth, the server uses a list of priorities to determine which activities will be able to access the Internet and which will not.
“Under normal circumstances, DNS traffic, [where the server connects with the actual web address], has the highest priority. The second highest priority is http traffic, or regular Web traffic. Then we go from there, in levels of priority. For peer to peer (p2p) traffic, we have very low priority,” said Arthur. “Peer to peer in and of itself isn’t inherently bad, it’s just how people use it. We have a lot of people using a lot of bandwidth and at some point something has to give.”
Arthur noted that much of the activity that appears during the evening hours tends to be very localized.
“There are instances where three or four people are using most of the bandwidth. What we’re doing now is working with ResTech and figuring out these people, so we can talk with them and see why it is they’re using up so much traffic. We can’t see what is being used that’s taking up so much traffic,” said Arthur.
“If it’s an educational function, we try to find a workaround.if it’s something else, and oftentimes it’s a new way of doing p2p, we need to fix that,” continued Arthur. “Other times we’ve found that their computers are being used by some nefarious other person who is using it to do other things. When we’re meeting with these students we’re not assuming they’re bad guys-we work with them to find a solution.”
One of the most recent concerns with a third party program taking over a computer was announced last Tuesday, the W32.pipeline worm. The worm poses as a picture attached to an instant message from someone on their buddy list, and then infects the machine once the file is downloaded. The Ruckus program, which was implemented for the fall semester, has not had any negative affect on the University’s bandwidth, according to Arthur.
“When we had the Ruckus program brought in, they provided us with two streaming servers. They provided us with the top 90 percent of what schools are listening to-what you’re trying to download comes from that traffic. It would never touch the bandwidth 90 percent of the time,” said Arthur.
Arthur also noted that the University actually maintains one of the largest bandwidth provisions for an institution of its size. Many other schools nationwide have reported similar connectivity problems.
“It’s not like we’re being [stingy] here.you can give people all the bandwidth in the world, and still not have enough,” said Arthur.
Finally, Arthur stressed the importance of patience with the student-run Residential Computing Consultant (RCC) staff.
“The RCCs that work for ResTech-they’re getting beat up pretty good. It’s not really their fault. They’re reporting the problems, and fixing the problems if they can,” said Arthur. “I know that they are the face that students see when students get frustrated about network connections. They’re students too. Trying to figure out how to get 150 Megs of material into a 65 Meg pipe is just out of their range of responsibility.”