response 166 of 264:

Dec 14 00:42 UTC 1998

Our understanding is that IIT folks (at least "in general") do not have
direct telnet access to the internet.  Here is the paragraph we got
explaining IIT's internet connection:

> yes, 164.100.25.83 is a gateway (running the Wingate s/w). It is connected
via > a DirecPC VSAT network to the internet. Since the routing of this network
> and the actual internet gateway to this machine is outside our campus >
network and jurisdiction, we are not able to implement access control lists at
> this moment to control the access to your m/c. Our main internet access is >
through a 64 kbps leased link on which > only HTTP and SMTP traffic is going
through a Proxy. Our users dont have a > telnet access to the internet at it is
bandwidth intensive (for character by > character frames). That is perhaps why
you did not get user's response when > you tried to contact them.

DirecPC VSAT is apparently a satellite based internet connect from
Hughes Electronics.  It's not clear to me how much bandwidth this
supplies; but it may be fairly limited by satellite channel bandwidth
requirements.  This is definitely a separate deal from the 64K link, but
it's certainly limited by the fact it has to run on a single windows 95
machine (gag).

A 64K link is tiny by US standards.  Any serious university level
educational institute here would have at least a T1 link to the world
(1.5M, or 23 times faster.) To get an idea what is available in the US,
take a look here:
        http://nic.merit.edu/michnet/maps/backbone.html
Unfortunately, this map only lists town names, not what's there.  Some
big places: Ann Arbor = University of Michigan.  Detroit = Wayne State
University.  East Lansing = MSU.  Marquette = NMU.  Houghton = MTU.
Etc.  Michnet is the long distance part of what was once called Merit.
Merit started as a 3-way consortium between MSU, UM, and Wayne state;
and the original network connects consisted of 3 56K links between A^2,
Lansing, & detroit.  This was back ca. 1972, basically around the time
the internet was just starting to take off, and way pre-TCP/IP.

MTU may be most nearly comparable to IIT in terms of size.  It has 6253
students, including 1639 entering students in the fall, and 636 graduate
students.  There are 415 faculty members, 1016 staff, making a total
employee count of 1431.  (Wages are higher in the US, so for example the
janitorial staff will be few in # and use much equipment to do their
job.) Houghton is basically located in wilderness in northern michigan;
not much industry and not a lot of people (the area of greatest
population is around detroit, in the opposite corner of the state.)
Nevertheless, Houghton has (if I read the map right) the equivalent of
something like 8 T1 lines coming into it.  This capacity may be a little
deceptive, as some of it is undoubtedly shared with NMU in marquette,
nevertheless, it is safe to say that MTU has at *least* 40 times more
network connectivity than IIT's "main" internet connect.

I'm not saying any of this to belittle IIT.  I realize that economics
are a bit different in India, and after all, we all have to start
*somewhere*.  It wasn't that long ago that grex's internet connection
was via a dial-up 33.3K PPP line.  Compared to most entities on the
internet, grex's 128K ISDN link is still pretty puny.  Michnet has a
maze of 128K ISDN links running all across the state (as part of their
K-12 effort) which they don't even bother to try to map.  The reason I
want to describe this, is to try to put into our perspective what we
think when we read of IIT's 64K link.  Compared to most organizations on
the net, IIT's internet presence on the internet *is* tiny.  I hope IIT
will be able to enlarge its network capabilities, but I also hope that
IIT will find some way to instill a better sense of network ethics in
its network community.

response 168 of 264:

Dec 14 03:14 UTC 1998

(Ah.  I was dividing 1500 by 64 and rounding off.  There's also the
european version of a T1 which is a slightly different size (larger?)
and may be what would be found in India.)

response 170 of 264:

Dec 15 05:41 UTC 1998

(Yeah, E1 runs at 2.048e+6 bps [2M or 2.048M depending on how you want to
state it], 32 channels at 64kbps each)
 
Around 10:00 or 11:00 PM tonight the system had load averages around 77 again.
Was this a fork bomb from the same site?

response 172 of 264:

Dec 15 13:58 UTC 1998

(E1 is the standard in India. BTW, in E1 (and I guess in T1 too),
channel 0 cannot be used as a data path -- it carries the framing
information. Hence, the effective bandwidth of a T1 will be 23 * DS0)

response 174 of 264:

Dec 16 06:01 UTC 1998

spiff:
  I'm glad you jumped in here and joined the discussion.  I believe in an
early response to this item, someone bemoaned the fact that while we had
over 1000 users who regularly came in from that IP address, we knew of
none who were regular bbs users, and who might be able to participate in
the discussion about what might be appropriate action.  Have you been in
the conferences before?  Please pardon me, if I've failed to notice your
ID on other posts.  Or were you directed here by the MOTD?  This item was
specifically mentioned in the MOTD, in the hopes that some users from that
site would find an alternative gateway, and would be willing to help us
brainstorm a way to protect our system, so that we can continue to provide
the maximum service to the most people, within the limited budget we can
muster.
  I'd rather not continue to re-hash the past, and I would prefer to work
together to prevent further abuse of the services we provide.  The
thousands of IIT students that make legitimate use of our e-mail, party,
and lynx services are as important a part of our user community as anyone.
We want these services to be available to everyone.  
  Are you willing to help protect these services, for yourself as well as
the 26,000 other legitimate users all over the world?  Do you have
personal contact with the people who administer the gateway?  Might you be
able to influence them to implement a logging system, so that users of the
gateway may be traced back to their source, should an incident like this
occur again?

response 176 of 264:

Dec 28 03:50 UTC 1998

This was really informative, imagine over a quarter of the students at one
Indian university (all the freshmen?) using grex for email!  I am starting
to get some idea of why chatting with India can be so slow, and why some
people tell me they can only communicate by email instead.
What percentage of Indian's go to college?  It is probably much higher here,
where 5000 is a small college.  But in India 500,000 is, I was told, a 'small
village'.  I have found all Indians requesting to chat with me to be highly
intelligent and almost all of them exceptionally polite, too bad there have
been a few exceptions.
        Is the IIT reconnected with grex?  I have not been getting any chat
requests for a few weeks, but maybe that is due to the long vacation.
        (By few exceptions I did not mean people requesting chats, but the fork
bombers).

response 178 of 264:

Dec 28 11:09 UTC 1998

So, after we lifted the ban we had further instances of the
same vandalism from that same site?  I was under the impression
the site was going to remain open unless problems continued.

response 180 of 264:

Dec 28 21:47 UTC 1998

Yuck.

response 182 of 264:

Dec 28 22:54 UTC 1998

   They already have free email.  They've had it for a long time.
But its so slow compared to "fast" systems like Grex that they've
flocked en mass to us.

response 184 of 264:

Dec 31 21:39 UTC 1998

Compress the "large" mailboxes and place them in the users' home directories.

response 186 of 264:

Dec 31 22:51 UTC 1998

Our space limits assume that not all users will use up their allowed space.

response 188 of 264:

Jan 1 01:56 UTC 1999

   We can't reasonably put compressed mail in folks home dirs, as we
don't have enough space in /a and /c right now.  Remember, these mailboxes
are filling up, through no fault of their owners.  They can't get to us
to look at the mail.

   Only a few people list other email addressed; those that did and have
given an indian address (ending in .in) would be likely horrified to find
that we were trying to send them their mail.  Remember, IIT kgp has a 64K
link for mail (and everything else) to the outside world.  We'd clog the
link up completely doing this.  Until them mail cleared their sendmail,
it would be sitting here.  So that option doesn't work very well.