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Peer-to-Peer Computing >> Meeting the P2P Challenge
1/31/2005
Turning to Vendors
Still, not every college has the luxury of innovation. Other schools, pressed for programming resources and time, have opted instead for out-of-the-box solutions from a variety of network management vendors. At Juniata College (PA), for instance, technologists responded to P2P-fueled network bottlenecks with the PacketShaper software solution from Packeteer (www.packeteer.com), which enables network administrators to control bandwidth utilization and application performance by limiting all campus P2P applications to no more than 384 kilobytes of bandwidth. According to David Fusco, director of Technology Operations and an assistant professor in the school’s IT department, for an initial investment of about $12,000, and annual maintenance of roughly $1,000, the PacketShaper product has enabled him to “eliminate the activity by choking it.” What’s more, he adds, while P2P abuses still occur at the school’s Huntingdon campus, they no longer impact performance of the network overall.
Technologists have employed the very same solution at Cazenovia College (NY), where P2P abuse was so rampant that CTO James Van Dusen says he had to dispatch a network administrator every few hours to reboot campus routers. At Cazenovia, however, Van Dusen further secured the network against P2P by investing another $12,000 in a one-way firewall solution from Vernier Networks (www.verniernetworks.com).
Today, when students connect to the network, they broadcast one-to-one to the firewall, and other students have no ability to track down anyone’s machine but their own. Beyond this, each student is allowed 500MB of free space in a home file on a campus file server, where he or she can download files of any kind. Cazenovia scans the file server nightly for material that has been downloaded illegally.
“We’re not going into student machines, we’re just investigating the file server to keep ourselves out of trouble,” Van Dusen says. “While we don’t prohibit P2P, we watch it closely and limit our liability completely, solving the issue that groups like RIAA complain about.”
At DePauw University (IN), network administrators yanked the purse strings a bit harder, and took a more complicated, three-pronged approach to controlling P2P. First, they employed Packeteer’s PacketShaper to limit P2P bandwidth overall. Second, they implemented Quality of Service (QoS) measures on Cisco switches (www.cisco.com) to block certain traffic ports and divide the network into various segments, or Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs). Finally, they are using endpoint compliance capabilities from Perfigo (purchased by Cisco in October 2004). Dennis Trickle, CIO and VP for Academic Affairs, says that the heart of this cumulative, $60,000 solution are the QoS capabilities, which ensure that users in academic buildings have priority over users in residence halls to use peer-to-peer technology of all kinds. Beyond that, for an additional $16,000 per year, Cisco keeps the routers up to date with all of the latest security patches, and the institution relies upon the very same technology to prevent the propagation of viruses and other threats, as well.
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