The mysterious and magical HP ENGINGEER!!

[Broomjockey]

ah=)

Though I dont know what you would need a second connect for,

I've got a desktop, a laptop, an XBox 360, a Wii, a network-attached storage unit, and sometimes my friends bring their laptops over. If my dorm had a no-router policy, with the way the rooms are designed, I'd be among the rebellion that would be sure to start.

[technical.angel]

And if your rebellion broke the network in your dorm?

If something is blocked or not allowed, there's usually a good reason for it.

[Broomjockey]

If something is blocked or not allowed, there's usually a good reason for it.

I know. We've gone over this ground previously. If it wasn't set up here for it, the students here would very politely request that something was done to fix it.

And if your rebellion broke the network in your dorm?

And pardon the language, but it's fucking already broken enough, no one would notice. But I was actually addressing the fact that AccountingDrone couldn't see the need for two connection points for one person. So chill.

[Pedersen]

I wouldn't rebel, but that's because I'd simply work around it, and fairly easily.

My computer runs Linux. Using Linux, I can set up a NAT'ing firewall. DHCP on the private side of the firewall only. From there, I can hook up a WAP of whichever variety. Set SSID to not broadcast, use WPA2 for privacy and authentication. Now my devices will be able to work.

Oh, what do I have? Well, in my house, right now: One desktop (for me). One MythTV backend/server. One MythTV frontend. One file server. One desktop for wife. One laptop each. One Mac (old G3, not used much). One Palm Treo 650, one Palm Tungsten T5 (both of which go over the network to sync). One Wii. I think that's everything.

The only clues the IT dept would have would be extra heat coming from the room (a lot of it), and some small amounts of extra traffic. Want to ban the MAC of my WAP? Go for it. It's not hooked up to the global net, it's on my private net. And that MAC doesn't hit the wire out there

So no, no rebellion. Just making things work my way. Already used to dealing with that due to my ISPs over the years, so this would be just one more instance of it.

[AccountingDrone]

My computer runs Linux. Using Linux, I can set up a NAT'ing firewall. DHCP on the private side of the firewall only. From there, I can hook up a WAP of whichever variety. Set SSID to not broadcast, use WPA2 for privacy and authentication. Now my devices will be able to work.

Oh, what do I have? Well, in my house, right now: One desktop (for me). One MythTV backend/server. One MythTV frontend. One file server. One desktop for wife. One laptop each. One Mac (old G3, not used much). One Palm Treo 650, one Palm Tungsten T5 (both of which go over the network to sync). One Wii. I think that's everything.

And this applies to the average broke student living in a dorm how?

Though I will conceed a laptop, a wii [both of which can be swapped out network plug in speaking] your phones dont go out over the network jack, they palaver with the computer via its own proprietary patch cord, and the file server? dude, if you think I am going to let some freaking random jackass connect to my personal equipment in a dorm, you are seriously sadly deluded about my naievete ... so A laptop, a wii, a smart phone and maybe an ipod. The laptop and wii can be swapped out ad lib, and the phone and ipod have proprietary hookups. Not an issue.

So, in the room you have 2 laptops, 1 each, 2 wii [or a wii and a gamethingy to be named randomly Ralph. I dont do consoles and have no idea who needs what hookup.] 2 phones and 2 ipods. 1 of each per student. 1 network hookup per student. They can learn to be nonstupid customers and nonentitlement whores and deal with the limitations.

[MrSmiley]

I've got a desktop, a laptop, an XBox 360, a Wii, a network-attached storage unit, and sometimes my friends bring their laptops over. If my dorm had a no-router policy, with the way the rooms are designed, I'd be among the rebellion that would be sure to start.

Personally I think you've brought too many toys to the dorm with you. College always seemed like a "pack light" experience to me... But I don't want to make any enemies out of moderators, so I'll be quiet now

Plus I may just be bitter because when I moved into a dorm 8 years ago (due to circumstances I hadn't planned on), none of the rooms had LAN ports. There were some hooked up on the penthouse level of thedorm building, and plenty strewn around the campus... but none in the dorm rooms themself. Since I had a laptop (and only a laptop) at the time, I didn't feel too limited about it. I could pack it up and leave my room if I needed to play around the Internet (which I did much too often) or kill people in Starcraft/HalfLife1.

[Geek King]

I really hope those grants for wireless come in soon!

I still say a giant cell tower in the middle of campus would work. You could work it into the horse jumps.

[Broomjockey]

Personally I think you've brought too many toys to the dorm with you. College always seemed like a "pack light" experience to me... But I don't want to make any enemies out of moderators, so I'll be quiet now

Nice thought, but I *live* here. I don't just reside here. I don't go to my parents on weekends or holidays, or even during the summer break, and I've been in the building for over 3 years. Apart from certain things I just absolutely don't have the room for (my books and a collection of statuettes), everything I own is in this room.

[technical.angel]

I still say a giant cell tower in the middle of campus would work. You could work it into the horse jumps.

On a somewhat serious note, we do have the tower for the radio station. That could work.

Honestly, we're not worried about outside spaces yet, but I think that might be tied into the grant. I think we're trying to make the alum realize that no really WANTS to go sit by the "lake" and be on wireless. The sooner we can have wireless in the res halls, the better for me.

And I'm not EVEN going to go into the issue of landline phones. UGH!

[Pedersen]

And this applies to the average broke student living in a dorm how?

Heh. I do like how someone who, for some reason, has more gear than normal could be a "stupid customer and entitlement whore" who needs to learn to "deal with it".

So, how does what I said apply to the typical dorm student? Quite easily, actually. Let's start with this: Linksys BEFSR41. One mac address visible to the college. Firewalled. Personal network in the dorm room. Issues DHCP to computers connected to the personal side, etc. Next up, Linksys WAP54G. Connected to the previous device. The wireless MAC address never crosses into the university side of the network. Go ahead, ban it at the dorm switch. It won't be noticed.

Now, say hello to any number of wired or wireless devices for one student. Want to be on the internet in the common room with your laptop? You'll probably get good enough signal for that. Want to have a Wii/PS3/XBox360? Not a problem. Got a laptop and a desktop that you have reason to have both hooked up at the same time? Again, not a problem, not anymore.

Oh, yeah, I'm a compsci major (well, was, I've got my BS in it already). Out of anybody on the campus, I'm one of the ones more likely to have more valid use of multiple IP addressable devices hooked up simultaneously. Remember that huge list from before? All of them are capable of accessing the internet. And whenever I fire one of them up, they do.

So, if I'm a "stupid customer and entitlement whore", well, so be it in this case. I'll wear that label proudly.

[otakuneko]

And when they find your AP with the sniffer, they block the mac connected to the eth port in the room -- which would be the lovely befsr41 (nice, stable little box, that router, though I upgraded to a wrt54g running dd-wrt when I got a laptop). Wouldn't take a rocket (or computer ) scientist to figure out what to do about it.

Just sayin'.

As for me I'd probably bring in a switch, after being told routers weren't allowed, and just plug in my laptop when in my room. I don't have any consoles to worry about, but sneakernet for transferring files between computers is just so passé, especially when Gigabit throughput (using onboard or PCIe) is so much faster than thumb drives.

[Broomjockey]

And when they find your AP with the sniffer, they block the mac connected to the eth port in the room -- which would be the lovely befsr41

Except they just wander with a packet sniffer, they don't actually check rooms, so they'd get the MAC of the WAP54G, but since the MAC of that doesn't hit the college servers, blocking it wouldn't do anything. You'd need to block the MAC of the BEFSR41.

[otakuneko]

I figured they'd be able to follow the wifi signal to the room it's coming from, I suppose it depends if they took the time to do that or not. If they're walking down the hall, it shouldn't be too hard to narrow down the location. If they were really mean, they could shutdown neighboring rooms as well and let peer pressure do the work.

Solution? Turn down that transmit power, and off when not in use.


And speaking of solutions, getting back to the wireless printer topic: can the printer not do ad-hoc? I know it's easy to forget, but WAP's aren't the only way to get a wireless network going.

[technical.angel]

Okay, this thread hit OT and crossed the next state line.

Here, we accept that the res halls are the homes of our students, but the students have to accept that there are certain things we have to do to protect our network, and by extension, them.

Last year, when wireless routers were handing out IPs to entire buildings, we fought with Student Life, and we fought with the students themselves to turn off the durn things. The only way we resolved it was by sniffing out the MACs of the routers and blocking them.

If we weren't burned last year, and didn't have equipment in the halls that passed end of life back in the days where the dinosaurs roamed the land, we wouldn't care. It's not that we are wanting to cause problems for the students, but we have to prevent unauthorized access, and we have to make sure all authorized users can access the system.

Because of the nature of my job, I do get rather about people trying to fight past security restrictions. It's usually restricted for a reason.

I did not post this thread as the father, or students in general, being pissy about the ban on personal owned networking equipment, I posted it because the father was, quite honestly, a total ID10T about the "wireless" printer, and thinking that him being an "HP Engineer!!" made him da bomb!

Can we focus on that rather than trying to get the thread closed?

[Chromatix]

The biggest problem with routers (wireless or otherwise) is that it's stupidly easy to miswire them so that you have an extra DHCP server or three on the shared section of the network. This tends to stop everyone else's stuff working sort-of randomly.

Of course, high bandwidth might also flake out some weird old stuff in the network. 10base buses and hubs don't like lots of traffic because it causes collisions. Ethernet-to-ATM bridges can also be notoriously unreliable, because the wire protocols are just different enough to be an utter pain. So you do need to tie down bandwidth hogs to a single room.

They weren't nearly as common when I was on-campus (almost a decade ago). But, being a Computer Systems Engineering student, I also had a genuine need to plug in my multiple computers and do "interesting" things with them. BitTorrent and it's ilk didn't exist back then, of course, but I wanted to do a lot of really quite ordinary things that the network just wouldn't support.

I eventually managed to hack together a system that mostly worked. I had a triple-homed 486 (two NICs and a modem, all 16-bit ISA) running Linux for 9-month uptimes, and capable of routing about a T1's worth of data in each direction if the network wasn't clogged by everyone else - since the network itself was only 10base-T, that was quite impressive. I gave it a static IP address (highly necessary to connect back to it from the labs) by noticing that the DHCP window didn't cover all of the routed subnet. I even ran my own webcache and caching DNS proxy, and uplinked it to the official ones which were necessary to get out, but which were even more overloaded than the network.

All in a day's work really. It even managed to support my Java development when the official lab machines went flaky due to a premature beta-release JVM installation.

I've since upgraded the 486 to the PowerBook G3 I got at about that time, and which is now semi-retired to that function. It does the same sort of job in the same sort of way, just a lot faster. But now I have to hack my way past the *extra* NAT in the stupid combo modem/router. What happened to making plain old modems?