23 November 2014 update: This was my second foray into making Texas Open Records Act requests at A&M. When we’d first moved into the dorms, we had a completely unfiltered connection to the internet. A few years in, the university had the problem where the network link back to campus was getting completely pegged by filesharing traffic. The dorms had been set up to do 10 Mbit (half-duplex), but there was still a lot of internet traffic. The campus connection at the time was single OC-12, which maxes out at about 622 Mbit.

The solution to that was to install some packet shapers between the dorms and the rest of campus to slow down filesharing so much as to be almost unusable. As a college student, this was no fun. Exactly what got shaped down to zero wasn’t something that was advertised, so I went ahead and just did an open records request for it. To my surprise, there wasn’t any pushback on it, but I did get a lot of config file in a PDF.

So for anyone interested in the rules of how packetshaping is done and the results of it, I have all of the rules and statistics now online. Interestingly enough, usage is only shaped in dormitories and VPN. The document is rather large (over a thousand pages!), so it might take some time to grok interesting details out of it.