School network issues, talking to admin soon

[ittingles]

Hi all, I'm not really that good with networks, but I do know when the network I'm on is having problems. In the next couple of days, I'm going in to see the admin, to see if he knows there are problems. Right now I'm living on campus and am connected to the school network, which is connected to the internet via dual T-1 connections (small college). The internet connection is very laggy, and though it seems to do ok downloading web sites, any kind of online gaming is impossible. My friends and I have tried many different hardware and software configurations, and we are sure that it is the network. There shouldn't be any problems with file sharing bandwidth hogging, because they recently installed a new piece of hardware, an evil beast known as a packet-shaper.

Here's what happens. Click on a link, and it is anywhere between 0 and 5 seconds before it even begins downloading. Running Tracerts to various servers gives very random pings and packet loss, though generally major sites like yahoo.com are much faster. I experimented with a dial-up account and got a lot less ping, which just isn't right. Download speeds as well are very inconsistent. Sometimes I can get like 160 Kbps, other times more like 2-8Kbps (modem speed). I realize that on a network of this complexity there are many thousands of potential issues, but I am planning on speaking to the admin, who works with mich.net, which is the schools ISP. I really would appreciate any kind of input as to what kind of questions to ask, any easy steps that he might have overlooked, any issues that might exist only for online gaming, etc. Also, should I try to get info about the firewall, router, etc? Would knowing the hardware be useful to the knowledgeable among you?

Thanks in advance

[YeOldeStonecat]

It would drive me crazy, but most likely, he isn't gonna give you the time of day, or lose any sleep over your complaints.

Two T-1's, but are they full T-1's? Or frac T-1's, such as a couple of 128k pipes, 256, 384, 512, 768, etc...up to full 1.54M T-1.

CAN (Campus Area Network) topology....how is the campus connected together. Equipement in between.

Lack of controll of all other students and their use of the network, LAN games, etc.

[twwabw]

Packet Shapers are great tools- used to use one for prioritizing Citrix packets over a crappy wan link. I would also suspect they are possibly using a caching server to reduce traffic as well.

And why not? Here's a click from an article I read in Network Computing:

The big news in peer-to-peer file sharing these days is Kazaa, and its traffic peaked at 78 Mbps during that brief period when traffic shaping was turned off. This kind of traffic is why universities are looking into bandwidth-management devices. When 78 percent of your Fast Ethernet backbone is full of Kazaa traffic, there isn't much room for mission-critical and priority data, such as e-mail and Novell GroupWise files.

Kazaa... Morpheus..., etc. All of them bandwidth hogs. I'm sure it's frustrating for you, but if I were the admin I wouldn't be losing too much sleep over your "online gaming" not working too well. Not when I have mail, distributed apps, databases, and other important bandwidth concerns to deal with. Guess I'm a stick in the mud :rolleyes:

evil beast known as a packet-shaper

They're great! I can't say that I blame them. Here's a link to the article : Article on Packet Shaper (http://www.networkcomputing.com/1302/1302sp1.html)

[ittingles]

I appreciate your input, thanks for the replies.

Indeed, the pipes are fractional T-1's, and I'm fairly certain that they are 384 Kb each, but I could be wrong. Also, twwabw, you are right about the caching server, they just put one in last week. While you are probably right about the admin not caring too much about online gaming, I figure he might at least take a look at overall net performance, which as I said before is really poor. One of the lines is used only for broadcast services such as our webmail, and school web sites.

The installation of the packet shaper doesn't really bother me at all, I can understand why they did it, and I figure that if it improves overall performance, it only makes sense. What does bother me is how slow the connection can get. I can't imagine that network traffic is so high that it's causing such dramatic slowdowns. The admin already told me that game traffic is not using the same port on the packet shaper as file sharing, so that's likely not the problem, though I suppose anything is possible. I'm not sure what protocols file sharing uses, but online game servers use UDP, at least that's what I've read. I think that each protocol gets its own port, but you guys probably know more about this than I do.

Is there any particular kind of problem in your experience that causes slowdowns like those I described above?

Here's what happens. Click on a link, and it is anywhere between 0 and 5 seconds before it even begins downloading. Running Tracerts to various servers gives very random pings and packet loss, though generally major sites like yahoo.com are much faster (than smaller ones). I experimented with a dial-up account and got a lot less ping, which just isn't right. Download speeds as well are very inconsistent. Sometimes I can get like 160 Kbps, other times more like 2-8Kbps (modem speed).

Let me also say that it can get much worse than that, down to like a few bytes per second. For example, as I'm writing this, it's taking about a minute to load pricewatch.com. These problems did not exist during the 2000-2001 year, but rather started last fall. I've waited patiently for the IT to resolve this for 6 months, but they've done nothing to improve matters. They did not originate with the installation of any particular hardware, either.

Thanks again.

[YeOldeStonecat]

There ya go also...just a pair of 384 pipes. And most likely only one of them giving a portion of itself to the dorms getting internet access. Not knowing the priority of bandwidth given to the dorms, you can be sure it's a fraction of that 384...which doesn't leave much, as 384 by itself isn't much to begin with. Add just a couple of kids downloading WinMX or XXX videos from consumptionjunction.com, and your bandwidth is sapped.

[Matt615]

as was just said they arent starting off with too much bandwidth to begin with. When you take 384kbps and split that among the dorms you are probrably left with almost nothing.

Also to add, file sharing programs and gamind do run on a different set of ports, but that doesnt mean much. If file sharing is consuming bandwidth then whatever is left will be what you are going to get for gaming. So just because they are on different ports or even on two different protocols doesnt mean that they dont affect eachother. Bandwidth consumptions is bandwidth consumption no matter what port it is on.

[Brahmabull1214]

I am a student at Johnson and Wales in Charlotte and i play socom 2 online. However for some reason i cant connect here on campus. I've been told it's due to a fire wall put in place on the campus wide network which uses a t1 connection i believe.however my connection is also very slow and i get disconnected frequently. The firewall blocks all online gaming and p2p file sharing such as kazaa and morpheus. I was wondering if there was any way i could bypasss this firewall so that i could play socom online here at campus. Or if i cant bypass it is ther anything i can do so that i can play here on campus. i have tried calling the ppl up in providence who supposedly control the network here after calling sony and asking what to do and asking them to open the port but they say they cannot open individual ports. It uses ethernet cables and goes through all the steps to get online but stops at locating available socom 2 universes and then says connect failure if that helps. Also i am very illiterate when it comes to networking and computers but i am very interested in knowing more about both of the subjects. What is the best and easiest source of learning about that that u guys have came across?

Thnkas in advance!