FlindersStudents

To better manage the University’s increasing Internet usage bill the Vice Chancellor’s Committee agreed to support the implementation of a University wide Internet quota/accounting system. This system is now in the last stages of testing and will be brought into use progressively over the next four weeks.
 

The University does not intend to charge staff or students for Internet usage required as part of their employment, research or course of study but will use the system to limit the volume of downloads by undergraduate students.  The system provides management reporting and collects baseline data that can be used to identify usage patterns.
 

Undergraduate students will initially be assigned a daily quota of 32Mb. Once an individual student exceeds this allowance their Internet access will be rate-limited to 64Kb/s until the following day.  The quota and rate limits will be reviewed after the first month of operation and may be subject to change.
 

Internet usage by staff and postgraduate students will not be subject to quota limitation but usage will be recorded.
 

In most parts of the campus all users will be required to authenticate before accessing off-campus sites.  Access to on-campus sites will not require authentication and will not count towards your usage quota.  The authentication process is started automatically when you first request a web page from an off-campus site. It will require authentication using your Flinders Authentication Name (FAN) and password.  Note:  if you are using an alternative off-campus access method (eg FTP) you will first need to authenticate using a web browser.
 

Staff and postgraduate students who encounter problems or issues as a result of the implementation of the accounting system should contact their local IT support staff in the first instance. For undergraduate students the Help Desk in the Library is the primary contact point.
 

Answers to some basic questions are provided at the URL below:
 

I have noticed that the library computers now deliver a pretty stern warning that “accessing anything that isn’t directly related to study at university is deemed to be inappropriate use of computer facilities”.

I guess that means that accessing this site (FlindersStudents) could be deemed as inappropriate usage.

Email Storage
In the last ten months the size of our email (campus wide) has doubled from 550 Gigabytes to 1.1 terabytes (that’s one million megabytes of data) spread over 700 million files.  At the present rate of growth we can no longer survive unrestricted expansion of the email system. The problem is not so much providing extra disk space for this expansion but being able to backup and retrieve the email system in the event of failure.

While the vast majority of email users consume a negligible amount of disk space a small number of users consume the lion's share. Out of 30,000 email users 200 users consume 25% of all disk space; of these 199 are staff. The problem has been exacerbated by some folks sending large email attachments to themselves - effectively using the email system as a free file store. There is no doubt that email attachments use a disproportionate amount of space, and if users were to delete old attachments we would have a manageable email service.

To contain the email service within manageable proportions it is necessary to restrict the amount of space that each individual can use - an email quota system.

Soft Quota
Each user will have a soft quota of xx Mb of disk space, which once exceeded will produce warning messages and set a grace period of 10 days during which there is no restriction on email either sent or received. Users are expected to clean up old emails, delete large attachments or save and remove them.

Once the grace period expires users still be able to send email but no longer able to receive email. Copies of their sent email will no longer be stored in their SENT folder.

Hard Quota
Each user will also have a hard quota of yy Mb of disk space, which once reached will cause all incoming email to bounce with a quota-full message to the sender. No email can be received until sufficient email and attachments are deleted to bring their email within the soft quota limit again.

As a number of users will be immediately over the hard quota as soon as the system is activated an extended grace period of 60 days will be set initially to allow time for users to manage excess email space.

Viewing Current Usage
You can view your current usage of email disk space by going to the web page

https://mail.flinders.edu.au/email

and logging in with your FAN and password. This will display your current usage and the amount remaining in your quota.


Mike Wiseman
ISD

I used the system for the first time the other day (logging in to use outside websites) and at the end of my thing the number of MB I had used was still at 0, which means I had used less than 1MB. So I figure I will be okay, but I think that for some other students who are studying media or often look at big PDF files or whatever, it sucks.

I think this is a bad move. 32 mb is really a tiny amount, I know I would go through that really quick. I note that they are not going to allow people to request a higher limit, but what if you study media studies or something that will require high bandwidth usage.