UCI’s Internet traffic increased at an alarming rate during the first 4 months of 2002. UCI’s bill includes a fixed component, plus an additional cost based on actual usage.

NACS monitors usage levels on behalf of UCI. The primary two sources of traffic increase in 2002 might be characterized as “recreation” and “abuse”

“Recreation” includes downloading large video and audio files using “peer to peer” applications similar to Napster. NACS has limited the bandwidth allotted to peer to peer applications in an attempt to reduce recreational usage and its impact on campus costs.

An example of abuse would be an unauthorized person taking over a campus computer, and using it as a remote server. NACS is addressing abuse through several activities, including analyzing daily network traffic looking for “top talkers.” These are the machines making a disproportionate demand on the network. NACS can sometimes find compromised systems in normally quiet machines that suddenly start making unusual demands of the network.

NACS has collected links regarding network metrics and campus Internet usage at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/metrics