College Internet slow but they claim to have Massive Bandwidth

[phenious]

Ok, here is the deal. My college www.rollins.edu say they have 4 T1 Lines yet the internet is either down 1/2 the time or just down right SLOW surfing techIMO is a challenge most of the time assuming I can get online to post with you all. What I am looking for is some tools that can monitor bandwidth and analyze slow downs in the network assuming this is possible. I work at the help desk so I feild all of these questions from "why does it take 10 min for hotmail to load, to why is this song taking 50 hours to download?" Anyways.. we are a small private school so the number of students is small compared to most schools. Currently we have 1733 day school students, most of them live on campus in the dorms which share the net access. There are a total of 3829 students enrolled which could use the network any time they choose so I would say that the load isnt as great as say... FSU? Anyways... Do we really need more bandwidth or do you think we just got a screwed up network and such. I was told we are using Aldephi??? routers or something that has a similar name. Anyways... any tools that could help see were some slow downs are or anything would be great. Students pay on average $37K per year to come to this college and they are getting tired of the slow downs, The network guys there is 1 main guy and 2 guys helping him for the whole network say its not their fault so the adminstration is just telling the students to live with it for a while but its been this way for 7 months now. I just wanna see if I can help these guys out or give the administrator the info they need so they can get some new network guys.


-: phenious :-

why is this song taking 50 hours to download?

interesting someone would atuaclly complain about that. do the network admins block the ports for those p2p programs?

I would seriously look into that. having several computers on a network uploading to p2p can seriously slow down a network.

also how about virus protection, i know on a college network alot of kids have no clue how to protect there pc.


http://www.solarwinds.net/Tools/Netw..._Perf_Monitor/

[krohnjw]

Well, being at purdue, ~36k students, on their student network a few years back, when napster exploded the internet there slowed to a CRAWL.

They then instituted bandwidth quotas and capped people.
From having 8 users on a home network I can tell you the amount of traffic generated by kazaa and other P2p programs when they are "searching for other sources" and uploading is ridiculous. We have set all of those ports as completely low priority through the router so that any packet on port 80 or 22 is allowed through and routed first. I wouldnt doubt that your university is doing something along these lines or actual layer 7 filtering.

I can tell you that research lines were NEVER bogged down, as they received more dedicated bandwidth and were not abused like the student lines were. The cause of the slowdown was the students and the massive amount of network traffic generated. The administration cannot let the students take all of the bandwidth for the university as educational research and development is far more important than a student's ability to download at high speeds.

If you have real issues contact your university's networking department to discuss the issue in a rational manner.

[phenious]

The networking department consists of 3 guys... which if the network was implimented correctly would be ok I guess but its sucks right now and they just keep saying wait till we upgrade and fix everything over the summer so hopefully that works. If you read the link in the first post they are limiting how much bandwidth is allowed for AIM and all P2P networks and I was told they blocked uploading on them... and I have religously turned off sharing and browsing of personal files on every students machine I have touched with kazaa and the likes.

-: phenious :-

[DVNT1]

...The cause of the slowdown was the students and the massive amount of network traffic generated...

I would suspect the same. Partly being virus/worm infections too.

How to really tell? Sit at the T1s' connection point with a packet Sniffer that does analysis too. Let it monitor for 24 hours and then look at the results based on things like protocol, destination address, source address, and destination port.

free 15 day trial http://www.networkassociates.com/us/...20Technologies

[phenious]

I am looking at the software and will see what I can do with the demos but i cant afford those price tags if they work well Ill try to convince my school to buy them. Ill e-mail the main guy and ask him if there is anyway I can preform these tests with him and such. If You no longer see Rollins College in my profile its cause they kicked me out

-: phenious :-

[phenious]

I dont think virus and worms are to bad... they are anal about forcing people to scan and they intall virus scanners for free in the dorms and such so from what I have seen that is fairly under control. Also the firewall is locked down to where i cant even connect to my IRC server on port 21, 25, 80.

-: phenious :-

[M_Six]

I was going to launch into an explanation of bandwidth usage by students, but I can't top anything krohnjw said. He laid it all out there, nice and neat. 4 T-1's for 4000+ people isn't a whole lot, and like the man said, they're probably limiting bandwidth available to the students. I'd say you're lucky if you have one whole T-1 dedicated to the students.

[phenious]

There are just 4K that COULD access it... a lot of the night school never touches it... so... on average there is about 500~1000 people doing stuff online on average.... never the whole student body..

-: phenious :-

[M_Six]

Still, a T-1 is hardly more than a good cable connection. Think four cable connections are enough for even 1000 people?