From: phil@adam.adelaide.edu.au (Phil Kernick)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.lp,rec.games.mud
Subject: Re: AUS MUDS ARE BANNED
Date: 7 Apr 92 01:51:02 GMT
Followup-To: rec.games.mud.lp
Organization: University of Adelaide, South Australia

pariah@uniwa.uwa.oz.au (Michael Malone) writes:

>An earlier thread commented that Aus muds could not be
>banned, and that they only account for a small fraction
>of network traffic.

I have no information about the bandwidth used by MUD sessions to and from
Australia, but I would be most interested in what proportion are initiated
TO, and what initiated FROM.

>      Extrapolation of this figure indicates that mud
>      could actually account for up to 20% of the inter-
>      national load, making it far and away the second
>      highest use of band width (after ftp).

This is unfortunately, pure speculation.  If there are some hard numbers
(like the 4% figure, if it is accurate) let's see them, but otherwise let us
stick with facts.

>    - Mudding is not allowed by Internet. NASA and other
>      US federal agencies have complained about the load
>      on the US backbone, which AARNet is attached to.

There is no actual "Internet" that could do anything.  NSFNET might be able
to have some input into it, but I cannot see why they would care *what* the
traffic is, as long as they still get paid.

>    - AARNet policy indicates that mudding is not really
>      an "academic/research" usage, and is thus disallowed.

No.  This was, to the best of my knowledge, never stated, and I have been
following the discussion in aus.aarnet.  Geoff Huston (sp?) said that use of
AARNET was governed by the acceptable use policy document, but did not
specifically state that any given use was improper.  I downloaded the the
document, and the following is an extract from it:

| 4.	Use of AARNet for commercial purposes, and use of AARNet for purposes
| unrelated to the broad areas of relevance to the academic and research
| community is not considered acceptable use of AARNet services.

This seems to mean that *only* academic use is acceptable, but then...

| 5.	The use of AARNet by Australian organisations other than AVCC member
| institutions and CSIRO divisions requires the execution of an AARNet Affiliate
| Membership Agreement by the organisation and the AVCC. The AVCC reserves the
| right to approve each application for Affiliate Membership on a case by case
| basis.

It is ok if you are a commercial organization with affiliate membership.
What if a company wanted to run a game from one of their machines?  Would
this be acceptable under this clause?

But then we get the kicker:

| 6.	Traffic originating from peer academic and research networks which
| conforms to the originating network's acceptable use policies is in general
| considered acceptable traffic to be carried over AARNet.

This means that, in general, if MUDding is allowed and accepted from any of
the peer networks, then it is allowed here.  I am not a policy maker, and do
not even claim to understand it fully, but it seems that the AARNET could
object to MUDs originating in Australia (they control the links), they could
not do a lot about Australians playing MUDs overseas, unless the NSFNET
formed a full policy on it.

There is also the following:

| 1.1	the AVCC, in conjunction with CSIRO and through the AARNet Advisory
| Board, will decide which categories of material it will allow to be transmitted
| and those it will not transmit;

I have not seen, and could not easily find, such a list, but

| 1.3	if material which AARNet has resolved should not be transmitted is
| injected into the network the membership of the network member responsible for
| that action may be terminated by the AVCC.

If the AARNET decides to ban MUDding, there is not a lot that can be done
about it.

>    - The international link had to have its capacity doubled
>      again this year. This costs AARNet in the region of
>      $50,000 a month. It has been suggested that the return
>      of undergraduate mudders necessitated this, altho there
>      is no absolute evidence to support the claim.

There is *no* evidence to support this claim.  Assume, as you have that
MUDding took 20% of network bandwidth to the US, and then look at the rate
at which the link speed has increased.  This 20% would be eaten by FTP in
less that a month (doubling every 6 months for FTP traffic).

>AARNet is actually quite reasonable. There have been 4-6 Muds
>running at any one time in Australia for the last 3 years,
>dominantly LPs. While there has been no approval (of course!)
>AARNet has tacitless ignored their existance, and yes, they
>did actually realize that these muds existed. However, in recent
>months, the use of muds, in particular on the international link
>has increased dramatically.

I agreee that AARNET has been good about it, but the first I heard about
this came from this group and not from aus.aarnet.  If there really is a
problem, then I agree that it needs to be looked at and solved, but I would
be disappointed if this was a knee-jerk reaction that was not backed-up by a
substatial volume of facts.

I would love to hear the true story.

>I am a mudder from way back, but I value my University's network
>access considerably. Some methods Australian users could use to
>help a little:

>2) Mud after hours only. While not actually decreasing the
>   amount of band width, this is considerably less likely
>   to be noticed.

Of course this will reduce the bandwidth = bytes * time.  If you restrict
the hours by half, and the volume does not double, then you have reduced the
bandwidth.  The only problem with this, is that what is after-hours here, is
typically not after-hours in the US.

>3) Use archie.au whenever possible for ftp transfers within
>   australia. Note that archie includes an up to date mirror
>   of wustl and many other major sites, and given that ftp
>   accounts for 80% of OS bandwidth, a significant shift to
>   use of archie would seriously decrease our problem.

Would it?  If the overseas link had half the FTP traffic on it, then the
proportion of MUD time would increase from 20/(80+20) = 20% to 20/(40+20) =
33% and I believe that it would be considered even more a problem.  But the
past shows us that use of FTP is unlikely to reduce...



Phil.

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   _-_|\    Phil Kernick                E-Mail: phil@adam.adelaide.edu.au
  /     \   Departmental Engineer       Phone:  +61 8 228 5914
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