How does the Net work?
Prachur talks about our LAN system, how it works and why it sometimes doesn’t work
The LAN of IITB – no conversation seems complete without it. Haven’t we all complained about it a million times – about the speed, connectivity and, of course, the LAN ban? Here's a brief insight into the network that binds us all and the recent problems it has faced.
The IITB network has 5 routers placed at Hostels 3 and 8 which connect the rest of the hostels. Routers at the Computer Centre (CC) and at the CSE and Aerospace Departments take care of the Academic area and the Staff area.
The total bandwidth available till a month ago was 32Mbps – half of which came from a Reliance connection. However, we have now upgraded to two connections of 64 and 8 Mbps and upgraded the existing connection to 32 Mbps, which gives us a whopping new total bandwidth of 104 Mbps. Of course, this means that speeds are going to increase while accessing external sites only. The change can be seen clearly while downloading a large file from an external site. The download speed goes up to a few hundred Kbps. The peak usage timings are in the afternoon and from 10 PM till midnight and speeds reduce visibly during this time period.
The LAN came under lots of criticism a few weeks ago because of its extremely slow speeds. The reason was that the Reliance connection was not functioning to its full capacity and, as a result, our bandwidth was effectively reduced to 16 Mbps. This led to the LAN upgrade. Even with the recent upgrade, we have not been able to use the full bandwidth as it takes time to configure the system to use the new connections. The CC is performing the required modifications and updates.
Even after the upgrade, issues continue to crop up once in a while. There were particular weekends when the network hardly worked at all. One reason was netmon. Netmon is the collective name for four computers with numbers NM-1 to NM-4. One of these machines was not functioning properly, and this led to a heavier load on the other three machines. That machine has now been fixed and is running smoothly.
Another problem that occurs repeatedly is that a lot of people do not configure their software updaters (like Adobe), meaning that these updaters keep on sending requests to netmon which are constantly rejected as they do not have the proper authentication. Even a couple of such unconfigured updaters in the campus eat up a huge chunk of netmon’s processing time. This is known as bombardment, and the CC can and has fined defaulters. In almost all cases, the defaulter has no idea that he/she is bombarding netmon, and is unpleasantly surprise when he/she finds a mail in his/her inbox informing them that, instead of having won a Nigerian jackpot of Rs. 500 million, they have been fined Rs. 500.
(Prachur Goel is a third year student of the CSE Department. He can be contacted at prachur@iitb.ac.in)
