Further to what Nick wrote, you can first connect to seis.bris.ac.uk and then to snow.cs but not directly to snow.cs. I assume that they only accept connections from 137.222 addresses and the restricted network is on a 172.19 address space.

We have had some odd effects connecting to CS servers from the restricted network, but haven’t yet been able to get to the bottom of them.

One way round it – try sshing from your PC to seis.bris.ac.uk (which all students have an account on) and the sshing from there to snow.cs

People in classes all day can still use ResNet in peak time. They can still do some large downloads, online TV and radio, and other high bandwidth activities – but just not an unlimited amount of it.

Is it fair? We set the policy and allowances at such a limit that 90% of students on ResNet are completely unaffected by it – their evening usage has always been less than the cut off. The other 10% of people are the heaviest users – those 10% were using half our network capacity (as much as the 90% put together). Too much traffic causes congestion, which slows down ResNet for everyone.

Is the service the same service as advertised in October? We’ve always had provision in the ResNet regulations to the effect that generating excessive network traffic is a breach of the regulations, but we took action on a case by case basis. The fair usage policy introduced in November and amended in April is a clearer version of the same provision, setting down more precise limits.

Sending and receiving email to local servers (your Bristol account) doesn’t count, but if you have an external email provider like gmail it does.

Blackboard and other local sites don’t count.

Your point about removing the Security CD is a good one that we are considering for this year, replacing it with our Samba share. For people with IP or Browser problems the CD is good because we have tools / applications on the CD to help them. The production internally of some 5000 CDs is quite time consuming, although it is fun to watch the burner in action we may simply have a small number of CDs in each hall that can be used if there are problems.

The penalty box is a good one and one we have discussed – I think we’ve pretty much thought of all the different ways that BW management can be done – we could have had a rolling window of allowable transfer and if you go over the limit in a week then you’re placed in the restricted network until your transfer reduces below the threshold. The problem we feel is that it may be confusing for users and they may not be sure where they are from one day to the next. Also moving networks on a regular basis means less continuity of service as you get a new IP each time, terminally interrupting current sessions. That’s enough rambling for a Saturday – time to go and wake my baby!