On Apr 21, 2005, at 4:57 AM, Mikael Byström wrote:
So what's stopping you from putting a bandwidth quota on these services?
Nothing, in fact the study that produced the startling statistics was done to support just such throttling. It was done in the dorm subnets, the worst offenders (accompanied with much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time); in the other parts of the University it's an issue of inappropriate (and illegal) use of state property. (though that line is blurry, since in many cases systems in research labs actually belong to the grant holder, not the state, moreover large numbers of grad students and even faculty have their own systems on the network.
Also, network administration on campus is enormously decentralized, since the computer network was never (and still isn't to some extent) viewed as a purely infrastructure item, like power and phones, but done on a department-by-department and College-by-College basis.
It's a mess, but it works. It has also kept us remarkably free from some of the crippling outages experienced by more centralized institutions during various virus and other exploit outbreaks.
(for example, Melissa didn't hit us too bad; it completely shut down e-mail at Arizona State up in Tempe. They have the rigid, centralized corporate model of IT up there. Like the reed in a storm, we're flexible, and various parts of campus can easily be quarantined to prevent spread of something.
Up north, all roads lead to IT. Everyone must use the central mail server, Exchange-based, of course, dontcha know. On the other hand it was well into the 90's before the UA actually had a general access e-mail system in place, which is why we have a proliferation of academic units (like ours) with their own domain, mail servers, etc. If you wanted e-mail you had to roll your own.)
It's complicated, as always, by issues of academic freedom, our status as a public institution and such. This can be an interesting place to work sometimes. Suffice it to say, it's somewhere in between a business and private homes.
Anyone who thinks that a University can be "efficiently run like a business" a) has never worked in one, and b) has never read Dilbert, which after all, arose out of 'efficient' business.
I hold no great love for the recoding industry as it stands, and sincerely hope that the proliferation of online sources of music, coupled with the rapidly dwindling costs of music production do in fact fundamentally change the balance in favor of the artists. The industry as it stands now is remarkably like indentured servitude for the majority of artists with contracts.
-- Bruce Johnson
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