Status of Games (local and off-campus) in the ResNet network
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From the Director of CIS
- DHCP is guaranteed at least 1 Mbps to assure people can renew leases
- Peer-to-peer traffic is limited to 15 Mbps
- Everything else (including games) contends for all remaining bandwidth (roughly 84 Mbps).
We have no policy about games on ResNet.
We do not try to limit or disable games. We likewise do not try enable games. Games are just another form of Internet traffic that we treat as unidentified content.
We do currently have some restrictions on ResNet traffic that are intended to restore a basic level of usability and restrict the flow of worms (particularly Blaster and Nachi). At the moment, this means that our ResNet routers do not pass TCP port 135 connections, nor do they pass ICMP pings. These restrictions are known to affect the ability to mount a Labs home directory on a ResNet machine. These restrictions may also impact certain games. In either case, these are simply side affects of our attempts to control the spread of worms.
We continue to have a firewall in front of ResNet as well as the campus firewall. The policy of what to block and what to allow is designed to provide a level of security. The firewall policies have not changed this year. Some of the blocked traffic could have the side affect of inhibiting some games.
Since we do not try to enable games, there is no point collecting information about games that are affected. We have no plans to try to selectively enable certain games.
The Packeteer "packet shapers" have been undergoing some software upgrades recently.
The purpose of these upgrades is to add code to identify and properly classify new forms of peer-to-peer file sharing.
These upgrades have no known relationship to game traffic per se. There have been some problems (both hardware and software) during the upgrade, but we are not aware that the problems had any more impact on games than anything else. I think we have learned that game players are some of the first people to call when there are problems, and that may have led to the misperception that we were doing something to inhibit games.
The current bandwidth policy implemented by the Packeteers is roughly as follows: