The excessive use of Napster by students has considerably strained the Dartmouth College network, forcing Computing Services to limit the popular program's traffic.
According to Computing Services spokesman Bill Brawley, Napster related traffic on the Dartmouth network typically consumes two-thirds of the College's total bandwidth -- causing excessive network congestion and crowding out other College Internet services like email and web browsing.
And while Computing Services does not plan to totally block the use of Napster on campus, it has decided to curtail the bandwidth available to Napster users. The program's users may notice their music downloading more slowly than before, as total Napster traffic is limited in its proportion of total network capacity.
"We're not out to ban Napster," Brawley said. "We want to make sure there are resources available for everyone." This solution, he added, will enable everyone to get their "fair share" of network access.
Steve Campbell, Senior Programmer at Computing Services and Brawley did emphasize, however, that Napster related problems had nothing to do with Sunday night's massive network outage.
Campbell blamed Sunday night's catastrophe on "some unusual type of network traffic [that] triggered a bug in network software." According to Campbell, services were restored by approximately 3:30 a.m. yesterday, almost seven hours after the network initially went down.
Testing of the Napster limiter began last Friday in the "outbound" direction, or transferring from Dartmouth computers to the outside world. Limits on the "inbound" direction, or the speed of downloading at Dartmouth, began yesterday morning.
"We're finding that the [Napster limiter] we're testing right now does work effectively," Brawley said. "When we put the limits on Napster, we noticed there was other traffic to expand to fill the space ... showing that Napster was clearly displacing other kinds of traffic," he said.
Brawley hopes that with the network capacity freed from the pressure of Napster use, community users will be able to enjoy increased responsiveness and download speeds from network operations other than Napster, such as email and the Internet.
As for the possibility that Napster may soon be shut down by Federal courts regardless of what the College does, Brawley said that other music-trading services will undoubtedly follow it, and the College may impose similar limits on those services in the future.
Although he eliminated the Napster problem as a cause for Sunday's shutdown, Campbell did speculate that a type of audio and video streaming software called "Multicast" sparked the "chain of consequences" that caused the network to cease operating.
But Campbell said "there is nothing wrong with that type of program," and that Computing Services staff would review computer logs today to attempt to pinpoint the initial cause of the shutdown. Due to the wild unfolding of the network failure, however, Campbell said he did not expect they would find the root cause.
"It was a busy night for us," Campbell said about Sunday night. "We've always had a policy of keeping hands off the network near the end of the term," he said, so students don't have difficulty studying for exams.
Work continues at Computing Services to improve network reliability for the long-term, Campbell said. "We need to make the network more robust. We're working on doing that ... During term break, we're installing some new hardware and software that possibly could have prevented this."
