The hostel is filled with surfing champions.
HTTP bandwidth utilization alone, has hit 1TB in one weekend.
We’ve implemented new hardware. So your bittorrents should be slower. Conversely, everyone’s web access should be more stable.
We’re testing a dedicated piece of hardware just to ensure all users get fair usage. Logged reports over the weekend shows that the device has been successful. Hope things are also looking good from the users.
One user, alone, in one morning, just downloaded 7GB worth of YouTube videos.
Dunno what to say……
Vendor’s time locked for the day, and some staff had to take leave for training and personal affairs.
The relocation will happen on Thursday instead.
There’ll be some downtime for the Wifi service at HELP Residence on next Monday morning, 10th Oct 2011.
We’re moving our equipment to a larger room. We’ve put in new electrical wiring for that room, and hopefully this can isolate the WiFi equipment from the rest of the rooms at HELP Res. Maybe with this set-up, the wifi won’t go down when too many people start cooking Maggi Mee in their rooms at the same time.
Many students at HELP Residence have been complaining that their internet is slow, and that they can’t access their course materials or submit assignments etc. These complaints have been channeled through various departments, and we have heard you.
We understand that the internet is indispensable for the modern college student, and therefore we will take every measure possible to ensure that all students at the hostel will have good internet services.
We have installed a network appliance to monitor the internet traffic over the last 2 months. Findings show that we can dramatically improve internet services by blocking video streaming, BitTorrent, RapidShare etc.
We may have no choice. We may have to start blocking all these selfish services. We are investigating these options now. For the moment, the 2Mbps bandwidth limit is once again in place.
People want to study.
Top session creation: e-Mule.
Top bandwidth usage: youtube.com
We are testing an appliance that we still don’t have the money to buy. But it’s able to show us what all of you are doing.
There’s a lot of negative comments on FB about the quality of the WiFi. At this point, it looks like we may have to find ways to prioritize quality of service for students who’s doing legitimate schoolwork over those who are downloading computer games or watching Korean drama.
e-Mule and BitTorrent are extremely taxing on network bandwidth. If there’s no way to control their use, and users continue to abuse bandwidth, then they’ll have to be shut down completely. Because there are many other students who need to use the internet to do their school work.
Over the weekend, Unifi has slowed down. Don’t know why. It’s happening to all our 10+ Unifi lines all over PBD, KBD and HELP Res.
Something is wrong. Lowyat forums got a lot of people complaining. But no official explanations from TM at the moment.
Seems to affect international links. Even pinging Facebook.com will get request time-out.
Hope TM fix the problem fast fast.
Just sharing some usage statistics.
1 GB is 1,048,576 KB. So that’s about 200GB of data downloaded every 24hrs, which is about 50 DVDs of data. The number of lines we’ve got, we can still support more than double this usage, technically… Of course realistically we can’t expect the full bandwidth that TM advertises, but even if they can only deliver half, we are still fine.
It also looks like everyone is most active at 1am to 4am.
There’s also a lot of upload. Most of this upload traffic is quite unnecessary. If any of you guys are using Torrent, you can limit the upload traffic a bit, don’t set it to Unlimited. Less upload used, more download for everybody.
Uptime is also very stable now. ‘Little’ downtime. Scripts and settings also in the server, so that if power goes out, the system will boot itself after power is restored. The system does not go down ‘so often’ anymore. (With IT systems, never say 100%, or else Murphy’s Law will come and bite you. Ada pantang wan…)
If anyone is facing problems accessing the internet, please look at your laptop first.
Learning more features in the firewall everyday. More features that we can enable to fine-tune surfing experience for a large number of people.
Earlier challenges: When all ports open, streaming TV and Torrents will create SO MANY sessions and consume so much bandwidth that all other services die.
Firewall added to control sessions: A clean PC/Notebook will be able to surf quite fast. But if the notebook is infected with a virus/Malware/Spambot etc, those hidden programs will use up the session limit, and surfing becomes slow to impossible again.
Port blocking: PS3 cannot run.
Final solution: HTTP (ie. web surfing) will get infinite sessions. No limits. All the ports above 1000 (ie. everything used by PS3, Steam, online games, Facebook games, SPAMbots, viruses etc) will also be unblocked, so that all services will function, but there will be a session limit for these services. There’s still enough sessions for games to run. Even torrents can run a little bit, but won’t be super fast.
With this compromise, all services are granted access, with a limit high enough for games to work, but also controlling torrents and streaming so that they don’t jam up everything. By all accounts, PSN and other games should run.
Last week, the engineers also followed up on some cases where residents were experiencing bad surfing speeds. In both cases investigated, the wifi was working fine. The problem was from malware/virus infection which was using up all resources. The virus used up all the available sessions, and the web surfing cannot squeeze pass the door.
When an infected laptop like this moves to the Chalk & Cheese wifi, it’ll suddenly be able to surf. Cos their wifi doesn’t control sessions, so all the doors are open. The viruses are sending out spam faster than ever, but there’s still a few doors left open for web surfing to go, that’s why web browsing can suddenly work at C&C wifi, but fail in Residence Wifi. But a setting like this will only be able to support a few users before the viruses overwhelm everything again.
At least with a firewall in place, the infected machines won’t affect the experience of clean machines, since everyone is given a fair share of traffic bandwidth.
In one room, only one of the resident experienced surfing problems, while her room mate had no problems at all. So the issue was obviously with the laptop.
So I’ll like to advise everyone to install an antivirus into their laptops. This could solve 70% of the problems some users are facing.
Some recommended and free Antiviruses like: Avast! and Microsoft Endpoint Protection are worth trying out.
Hmm… although we’ve unblocked everything… Dunno why some users still have problems with DDTank. What game is that? Is it so important? >.>
Well, we don’t know how the game works. But just in case, we enabled UDP traffic as well. Usually everything nowadays should be using TCP traffic. See see how how now?
