Waah! My illegal downloads won't work!

[Impetrix]

My school has a fairly good solution. There's a rolling 72-hour limit on uploads and downloads, and if you go above it and are spotted by the Master of the Network, you go in the Restricted Bandwidth Zone (dun dun dunnnnn!) and see your beatiful 100 Mbps connection throttled down to dial-up speed. There are currently.... (magic techie lookup) 10 people in it, including a buddy and advanced-support buddy I'm gonna taunt mercilessly in the morning.

Because of this, one of my buddies developed a dc++ server. Basically, all the badness of downloads (bandwidth clogging, *AA attention, RBZ, etc) only come into play when downloading from off-campus. So, sharing stuff within the network itself works fantastically. A few folks are on private newsgroups, others grab stuff from torrents, and once it's on campus, no one needs to download it again. Wonderful solution.

What's funnier is the ruling cabal (ops + personal friends) are overwhelmingly comprised of the tech desk folks. The lower staff members know and approve, since it really benefits the school, too (The administration... doesn't really need to know. They're jumpy.).

But when a peon student does something stupid (like call the desk to ask for help with the hub, or ask us to install it and set it up for them after being a general ass while we're trying to fix their oh-so-leet piece of neon purple dusty bewindowed crap with a dead hard drive and no valid windows license (but 2 different invalid ones!) we can reinstall), we have the power to take the Hub away from them. They fear our wrath.

Or, at least they would, if they weren't idiots...

[xlr82xs]

Network admins don't block things for the heck of it.

except of course when standard irc ports (6667 for example) get blocked because of some fear or another than anything 6660-6670 must be p2p downloads

[technical.angel]

Well, then it's still for a reason, misguided as it might be.

I guess I should say MOST network admins don't block something JUST because it would annoy people.

[Greenday]

With my school's firewall, I can't use limewire to download music/videos, not that I do...But you can only download from other people on the campus network who is on limewire. That's it though. Limits the amount you can find.

[gunsage]

This reminds me...we had a customer who was I-RATE because his speed wasn't up to snuff. Right, so...I have him go to a speed test site...PERFECT speeds. So what was his complaint?

Cust: "Well, SURE, it's working good HERE, but on Limewire-"
Me: "Ah! That's your problem right there."
Cust: "Whaddayamean?"
Me: "Sir, the speed you're provisioned for is the maximum possible. There is NO guarantee that you'll be able to achieve that within a peer-to-peer download engine."
Cust: "But I-"

It kinda went downhill from there. I was really rather surprised the person had the brass set to continue talking to their ISP about how they needed that kind of speed for their illegal downloading. Ironically, we also deal with security issues and a good bulk of our calls are monitored, SO...well, he may have very well been reported. Who knows?