[26856] in North American Network Operators' Group
Napster & other bandwidth hogs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ryan Bek)
Mon Jan 24 14:37:09 2000
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:57:25 -0500
From: Ryan Bek <rbek@gborocollege.edu>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-ID: <20000124175658983.AAA495.371@callisto>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Hello all -
I (and I presume many others) have had concerns brought to us about the
bandwidth hogging apps & services, like Napster Music Community. As many have
discovered, applications such as these can consume a good deal of a broadband
connection, as users can serve up files from their own machines, subverting
normal firewall configs that can prevent undesired behind-the-firewall
serving.
Since these apps are becoming more and more prevalent, as college students are
huge collectors of digital music, and as bandwidth is always a concern, I am
wondering what others in either the educational or business community are
doing in light of this. Even having logistical information such as, "close
ports x, x, and x" would be of assistance. I'd just like to have some
ammunition in case others higher on the food chain ask for this to happen.
While there *is* a big concern about copyright (lawsuits and such are in the
works against Napster), but being part of an educational community,
restricting services based on content is a *huge* can of worms that is dealt
with at higher levels than where I function. I mostly need to know the
technical end of stuff - Napster's site doesn't list any technical stuff like
what ports are used.
Thanks a bunch!
-Ryan-
Ryan Bek
Help Desk Manager
Office of Information Technology, Greensboro College
Phone - (336) 272-7102 x354
FAX - (336) 271-6634
