Steen said these were both reasons why the construction of a complete firewall would not be part of the HASCS plan.

"The reason we even discussed a partial outgoing network restriction was that some students were inadvertently and unknowingly turning their computers into servers and this greatly affected both the performance of their own computers and the network in general," Steen said.

A town-hall style meeting will take place this evening at 5 p.m. in Science Center D to give students an opportunity to better understand the current network problems and to discuss possible solutions.

Many students said they were eager to express their opinions and ideas on how to best handle the situation.

"I'm hoping that today's meeting will let us ask direct questions and hopefully get direct answers, rather than pounce on every shred of policy that gets hinted at in these public announcements," said Russell S. Cox '01.

Several students posted possible alternative solutions to the traffic problem on the HASCS newsgroup website over the weekend.

Last Tuesday, HASCS decided to restrict all outbound traffic on the FAS network to 10 percent of total bandwidth as a temporary relief measure.

Over the past week, HASCS has contacted student groups such as the Harvard Computer Society and the Undergraduate Council to discuss possible longterm strategies for solving the network's traffic woes, and is currently soliciting student volunteers to conduct tests of possible policies.