Last Monday, Franklin & Marshall Free Culture hosted a “Network Policy Information Session,” an open forum that invited members of the College community to ask questions about campus network policies. We were fortunate enough to have two representatives from Computing Services join us to discuss issues ranging from network freedom to security to online privacy. John Hoh, Director of Computing Services, took the brunt of the questions, which included inquiries about DMCA take-down notices, concerns about private information stored on College servers, and whether or not students are allowed to run services on their machines.

John Hoh, Director of Computing Services answered students’ questions about network freedom at F&M.

Mr. Hoh, with assistance from Matt Richard, the Network Access & Security Coordinator, also gave a general overview of how the campus network is laid out. He explained the multiple levels of redundancy and the hot-swappable spare components that keep the network chugging along 24/7.

So what did we learn about our network policies? In short, F&M has in place a number of reasonable network policies designed to ensure reliable access to all members of the College community. Specifically, we discovered:

* Users are allowed to run any services they wish on their computers; no ports are currently blocked save for those used by the major Windows worms. Students are given lengthy DHCP leases to publicly accessible IP addresses.

* The College prioritizes network traffic using Packeteer; 3MB/s out of 20MB/s of the College’s direct connection to AT&T is dedicated to P2P traffic, which was extremely valuable when we needed to seed Night of the Living Dead via Bittorrent. Packeteer was installed after P2P traffic began using over 99% of the network’s bandwidth, which made web and e-mail usage practically impossible.

* The College has received about 40 DMCA notices this semester about students distributing copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. No “false-positives” have been reported, and all have been complied with. In absolutely no cases was any student information given to the party claiming infringement.

* The guys running our network just want to make sure it’s available to everyone on campus. The two guiding principles for networks users are: abide by federal and state laws, and don’t impede the rights of other users of the network.

Score one for sensible policy!

What do others think are essential components of network freedom?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2004 at 2:49 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.