[geeks] P2P Monitoring / Mitigation

[Mike Meredith]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:04:55 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> > Especially since the distinction *should* be legal versus illegal,
> 
> I don't know that I agree with this.  There are plenty of sorts of
> traffic that are legal but would take a secondary priority to traffic
> for legitimate research.

There's two problems with that (except as I mentioned in another
message, reserving a proportion of your pipe for non-resnet traffic is
sensible) :-

* You don't know what traffic is for legitimate research or not.
  Downloading MP3s may be play for an engineer but what about an
  "Entertainment Technologist" ? Or someone interested on how P2P
  networks behave ?

* Students in Halls (or dorms) tend to believe that they have an
  Internet connection for general use and react badly when told they
  can't do anything that isn't work related. Furious students banging
  on your office door is something to be avoided (been there, got the
  T-shirt).

Concentrating on bandwidth (and asking users to behave responsibly) is
far better than opening the can of worms called "content inspection".

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 This message represents the official view of the voices in my head