[tech] [wheel] Internet Usage

[Daniel Axtens]

Hi fellow cabal members,

We're putting rather a lot through our internet connection. This is not technically a problem at the moment, but I think there is considerable value in being proactive on this issue. I have also overheard people talking about making large (several hour) downloads at UCC, and I think this is behaviour we want to discourage.

There are two things I'd suggest:
 1) Throttling non-freenets traffic on clubroom machines the wireless down from aarnet-fast to standard-residential-broadband-fast.
 2) Shaping the connections of non-UCC machines (probably by MAC address?) that use more than a certain amount (say 1GB) of traffic in a certain amount of time (say a day). Reduce their speed to something usable but not quite "broadband" - say 128kbps. Not sure how much work this would be.

I think these changes would have considerable value in 'encouraging' people to use our internet connection responsibly and appropriately.

What are people's thoughts? If we're in favour, I am happy to try to implement this stuff but I won't be able to start until after exams. I'm happy for someone else to do it if anyone has a burning desire to do so.

[DJA]

ps. Is it possible/desirable to cache steam downloads?