Re: [wg-pic] Tolly's Skype critique

["Randy D. Anderson" <>]

On a related note, I see that the University of Minnesota "discourages 
the use of Skype" and gives some rationale here:

http://safecomputing.umn.edu/safepractices/skype.html

But they stop short of actually banning it. I think we'll be 
investigating Skype here at Mason to try and figure out how much of a 
problem it presents to us.

Randy

--
Randy Anderson
Director, Network Engineering & Technology
George Mason University
Voice: 703-993-3445
Fax: 703-993-3403
email: 




Doug Pearson wrote:

> Anyone have a good reference to the inside technical details of how Skype works? 
>
> The Tolly article says "dearth of information available to us, we learned most of 
> what we know by studying Skype 'in the wild'"... but it doesn't share much about 
> those details.
>
> Doug Pearson
>
>
> At 04:01 PM 9/29/2005 -0400, Ben Teitelbaum wrote:
>  
>
> > Candace Holman 
> > <>
> >  writes:
> >
> >    
> >
> > > In this article, Tolly studied Skype peer-to-peer traffic to evaluate
> > > the impact on network bandwidth.  He quoted the Skype Web site on what
> > > peer-to-peer means: "A true [peer-to-peer] system, in our opinion, is
> > > one where all nodes in a network join together dynamically to
> > > participate in traffic routing-, processing- and bandwidth-intensive
> > > tasks that would otherwise be handled by central servers." Interesting
> > > view.  Tolly suggests that this means your Skype-enabled workstation
> > > may be functioning as a traffic relay for otherwise-centralized call
> > > processing, conferencing, voice mail, etc.  
> > >      
> > That seems like a fair definition of "true peer-to-peer" to me.  One
> > of the big reasons that universities may see a lot of Skype traffic is
> > the use of public IP addresses.  Skype needs a share of its users to
> > be non-NATted to serve as media relays for hosts behind
> > tricky-to-traverse NATs.
> >
> > -- ben
> >
> > --
> > Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/
> >    
>
>