Napster at MSU?

Jeremy Bowers bowersj2@msu.edu
Wed, 1 Mar 2000 19:34:42 -0500


>all hell breaking lose is not an additional 10Mbits/s..

Look at the daily graph, not the averages graph.  We're spiking up to near
100% usage, and hovering there for hours at a time. That is not normal.

Taken as an entire day, we show half-utilization, because at night the
network works fine.  On the larger-term summary graphs it looks like things
are normal.

>What you are forgetting is this:
>--doug
>he biggest recent problem is that the Computer Center gigabit
>router has been running out of CPU.  This shows up as packet loss
>almost everywhere.  Foundry's tech support came up with a memory
>optimization change that improved this.  With luck, that will
>resolve the packet loss difficulties here.
>--feb7th
>This is noticable in the http://mrtg.cl.msu.edu/netmon/msu/alldown.html
page..  I suggest >you take a look at it before blaming internal MSU
connectivity on napster, rather than >some major issues in the campus
rings..  as of right now, there are 359 alerts on routers >dropping packets

First, I'm not blaming the connectivity on Napster, merely considering it as
a possible source.  In light of recent news from other universities it is
not an unreasonable hypothesis.  Whether or not its the truth is another
matter entirely.

Second, if we're having such packet loss issues, then why is our bandwidth
usage sky high?  Network usage doesn't spike without a cause, and I want to
know what that cause is.

Is it the retransmissions clogging things up?  That makes sense to me... In
that case, did we experience misconfiguration issues in October of last
year?

I'm trying to figure out what's going wrong, not point fingers.  After a
month of waiting for it to clear up on its own, I'm tired of simply waiting,
esp. now that it's killing my network projects.