Computer services wins war on Napster
By Nate Bloomquist
Apache Editor
The battle between the popular music-swapping software Napster has grabbed headlines nationwide. IVCC’s computer services staff have waged their own war on the software and won without much of a fight.
Shortly after spring break, computer services has firewalled, or blocked the software on all IVCC computers in the college’s network. This will prevent anyone from downloading MP3 files, which can play music.
The blocking of the software was prompted as usage of it was wearing down on the network’s resources, specifically hard drive space and bandwidth.
Also, Chris Dunlap, the college’s associate director of network systems, said downloading the software violated IVCC’s computer usage policy, which students agree to every time they log into the college network.
“No student is supposed to be downloading the software anyway; it violates the agreement,” said Dunlap. “Evidently they must’ve known they were doing something wrong because we haven’t gotten any complaints about it yet.”
Each student is allotted a space of approximately 100 megabytes (one million bytes). When a student nears his or her limit, computer services contacts that student. If the student is involved in a computer aided drawing class, or some other activity that is heavily computer-reliant, computer services will most likely give that student more space.
While several students filled up their personal hard drives with MP3s, Dunlap said computer services didn’t delete files. He said students were only warned.
“We’ve got almost 4,000 users; that’s a lot of space we need,” said Dunlap. “If someone hits their limit it’s extra work on the system to increase the amount of space they have.”
Dunlap said Napster is the only computer software that has been firewalled.