donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (05/13/86)
Roy Smith (phri!roy) says: ... [S]ombody decided to send about 10 Mbytes worth of stuff through here via a link we have with pesnta on the west coast. I would guess that we average about 5 minutes of phone time a week with pesnta. Not that month! ... Our comptroller dialed the number on the bill and was quick enough to recognize that a modem answered and came to me to find out why I made a 5-hour call to California. I assured him it was a fluke, and we're still on the net. ... What a familiar story... Our link to hplabs was funded by a grant to a faculty member with research interests at Hewlett-Packard. Last year in October and November, some obnoxious person shipped tens of megabytes of data from a uucp site on the east coast to one on the west coast, using utah-cs!hplabs as one of their links (and the ARPAnet as another, I'm sorry to say; but that's another story). The professor who was the principal investigator on the grant received a bill for hundreds of dollars at the end of the month, instead of the usual tens of dollars. This professor was willing to subsidize some small amount of traffic across the hplabs link, the sort of goodwill gesture that keeps the network as a whole running; but he balked at hundreds of dollars and he insisted that we pull the plug, which we did. Hplabs still polls us, which is kind of them. I didn't have a chance to intercept the excess traffic and examine its contents. In an earlier incident in which our (indirect) link to BYU was overwhelmed (and the plug consequently pulled), the traffic was composed of all the known sources to 'rogue' and its variants. I would not be surprised if exactly the same data was on its way across the USA yet another time... I did get the names of the machines and the names of the accounts involved, and I tried to call the administrators at these sites and didn't get anywhere. I asked the professor and he decided to let the matter slide since he wasn't paying for the connection any more. It's clear that this practice (making other people pay the cost of your huge uucp transmissions) hasn't ceased on the network. (If it was the same person, Roy, I suggest we organize a lynching -- send me mail, we'll exchange names.) Does anyone have a suggestion for handling these awkward situations? Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn
bc@cyb-eng.UUCP (Bill Crews) (05/14/86)
> It's clear that this practice (making other people pay the cost of your > huge uucp transmissions) hasn't ceased on the network. (If it was the > same person, Roy, I suggest we organize a lynching -- send me mail, > we'll exchange names.) Does anyone have a suggestion for handling these > awkward situations? > > Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa At first blush, it would seem that this problem would sway one toward eliminating net.sources and depending upon mod.sources to be regulated. I'm not necessarily a proponent of that, but maybe that's the solution, no? -- - bc - ..!{seismo,topaz,gatech,nbires,ihnp4}!ut-sally!cyb-eng!bc (512) 835-2266
rap@oliveb.UUCP (Robert A. Pease) (05/14/86)
In article <3789@utah-cs.UUCP> donn@utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) writes: > >It's clear that this practice (making other people pay the cost of your >huge uucp transmissions) hasn't ceased on the network. (If it was the >same person, Roy, I suggest we organize a lynching -- send me mail, >we'll exchange names.) Does anyone have a suggestion for handling these >awkward situations? > >Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa >40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn One possibility is to have Pnews reject submissions from any user that has sent more than N kilibytes in the last month. Problem is that would be site dependent. Possible advantage is that there would be more encouragement to post sources to mod.sources instead of net.sources. -- Robert A. Pease {hplabs|zehntel|fortune|ios|tolerant|allegra|tymix}!oliveb!oliven!rap