Having listened to some of the selection and purchase discussions, all they seemed to care about was how effective it was at filtering viruses. Everything else seemed to be secondary. Now that may not have been the case, but that’s the vibe I walked away with. When someone has a network problem, they wouldn’t be getting the complaints and since both systems and networking generally ignore performance complaints I imagine this sort of thing wasn’t considered something anyone in ITS would ever get nailed with.
As evidenced by Rossman’s identical experience with Aion, once the filter picks up a few malformed or questionable packets it seems to start filtering those as if all subsequent packets were bad. All it would have taken is for someone to lag or crash in a weird way for it to start filtering WoW packets as well. In theory this could happen to any game or online application.
This is likely a configuration issue on the filter. Considering that it’s happening to WoW, which has always had a very strong userbase on campus and never had problems, it cannot be a packet shaper issue. WCU’s connection is an OC-12 (622Mbit, 601Mbit useful payload) and the max for the last month has been 345Mbit so it’s definately not a bandwidth issue.
This is a fight the club leadership should be having with ITS, not our individual members. Either get them to do their jobs or replace them and put *leaders* in your leadership positions.