BOO ON UBC ITSERVICES

When I moved into SJC over a year ago, I was curious to see what type of network they were on. I knew they weren’t part of ResNet, which was a good thing.

After I got my computer set up, I saw that SJC residents were on an unswitched network that was part of the larger UBC infrastructure. It was very, very good. Sure the unswitched part meant that we were wasting bandwidth here and there, but I was getting dl speeds of 400 Kb per second. Not bad. Now because we weren’t part of ResNet, no one was really monitoring our traffic. We didn’t have a sysadmin or anything. There were no traffic restrictions or port blocking. That meant we were clear to file share till the cows came home. It was great.

Some time over the summer, SJC residents got an ominous e-mail from SJC office. Our connections were going to be switched over to ResNet. Uh oh. They tried to candy coat it with the promise of better support because at least ResNet had a support department. Yeah, great, except that no one had any problems with our previous network.

At the start of September, everyone had to change over to ResNet. Unfortunately, at that time, that virus started infecting every computer on Earth, including machines on the campus. ResNet was slow as hell from all the traffic the virus was generating. To combat this, ResNet overseers began blocking port traffic on the network relating to the ports that the virus used. This was fine and dandy, but they got so scared of viruses and stuff, they began blocking (or limiting traffic on) file sharing ports as well.

Up until the time of the switch over, I was using WinMX as my file-sharing app. When we switched over WinMX became useless. All my downloads were capped at exactly 0.15 Kb per second. I knew this because no matter who I downloaded from, it would always cap off at 0.15 Kb per second. Bastards. The thing that irks me is that ResNet explicitly says on their web site that they have not blocked file-sharing programs. What a bunch of crap. Sure they have.

I thought I could be smart and change the default ports that WinMX uses. No such luck. I changed the port numbers dozens of times, but somehow, ResNet knows what is going on. I’ve used both unassigned and assigned ports, but it still won’t work.

I guess they have a right to block file-sharing, but don’t publicly lie and say that they aren’t. That makes me angry.