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Georgia Tech Implements Wireless Campus Net
Kenneth Atchinson writes: "This
article, which is also publishd in the Ga Tech Alumni magazine,
describes how The Georgia Institute of Technology (Ga Tech) is implementing a Campus-Wide Wireless Network. The LAWN (Local Area Wireless/Walkup Network)will cover 15 buildings including their library. They are using high speed, standards based 802.11 hardware. With the LAWN, a campus person with a laptop and a wireless LAN card can access the Net on campus, and maintain their connection while walking between buildings. But don't run to Ga Tech for free access, as they have some kind network authentication scheme to keep non-Ga Tech people off their Net. Kinda make you wish you were in College again, heh? Go Jackets!!!"
Georgia tech is a good school? Oh wait, it isn't. I'll stick to RPI.
In 1998, I was invited to make a presentation to a state licensing board showing them ways people could use technology to cheat on their license exams. Preparing for that seminar was the most fun I'd had in a long time! Why is that relevant?
Imagine, if you will, hundreds of students taking a test in a large classroom. One of them, near the back of the room, perhaps, has a little chat session running on his handheld, allowing his friend who took that test during the previous period to feed him all kinds of useful information. Hmmm.
Coming up with a dozen other ways to cheat on exams using a campus-wide wireless network is left as an exersize for the reader. Coming up with a reliable way to prevent such cheating is a great career move for anyone interested in an IT position with the school.
Heck, even "good 'ole Rocky Top" has it. Yes sir, the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus is implementing a campus-wide wireless initiative. Currently, the school of Information Science, the Computer Science Building, the MBA program, the Library, and the University Center are wireless-capable, with more on the way. If you want to check it out, head to the VolNet site. Enjoy. -AC
Allen Cain
Allen Cain
While you may not find full-text for _every_ journal article online, the Internet can, in fact, be quite useful for tracking down relevant journal citations to look up when you do go to the library. I remember spending hours at the library looking through massive bibliographic indexes in order to find articles on more obscure topics when I was in high school. Now it is easy for me to just do a little pre-research on the Web to help me find out information such as the names of leading experts in a particular field that (really) saves me hours of work when I actually do walk down to the library. The Web can be an invaluable resource for serious research if you know what you are doing and use it in combination with traditional research tools. That said, I agree that it sometimes isn't really necessary for students to have such a fat pipe. But remember that a primary purpose of universities is to expose students to the kinds of technologies that they will encounter in the "real world". It makes sense for colleges to stay ahead of the technological curve.
Oh, and my subject line... I will probably be attending Georgia Tech after receiving my bachelor's degree at Macon State College about 80 miles south down I-75. Go me. :-)
I just found out that these orinoco cards (formerly wavelan) will work with my Ipaq - very cool :). Too bad I go to Portland State University.
Drexel (Philadelphia, PA USA) has a complete map of their wireless setup. It was started back in 1998, and is still being expanded today.
I'm waiting for 802.1x and EAP to become a reality in the majority of the wireless gear out there. Off the shelf solutions will drive what I would choose, not some webserver/firewall thing. It's a solution right now, but 802.1x is really the way to go.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Thats funny I just read about Wireless Vending Machines, and would like to point something out for the admins at GIT (if any browse here) as well as anyone using wireless networks.
Full article here and its pretty straightforward.
AntiOffline uncovers F.B.I's secret mole
360 degrees of Karma
That is not all that new some highschools and even middle schools are opperating with a couple of those now. Though probably not that wide spread it still puts Georgia Tech to shame at not being that up to date on their area of expertice...technology!
Buzz Off
If Georgia Tech wants to get campus-wide coverage, they'll have to dot the entire campus with hundreds of these antennas. Not to mention the cat5 cable it'll take to hook up those antennas to the school network.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
They have been slowly extending the coverage over the last year-and-a-half. The goal is to make sure that coverage is at most a 4 minute walk from any campus building. Not a small feat when you think that UW-Madison is approximately 50,000 students spear out over a campus over 1.5 miles long and about a mile wide.
I was even one of the techs who tested some of the trial systems before the final hardware was chosen.
My school has a number of online journal subscriptions accessible to anyone on the campus subnet (or authenticated to their proxy), including many of the ACS journals. Yes, this is full-text and complete. Indeed, one can often find journals online through this service that they don't even have in paper form in the physical library.
// mlc, user 16290
--
University of Maryland, College Park is doing it as well, currently only the main library and one other building (Garrett Hall) are wired up but supposedly, hehe, they will expand on this next year and wire up more of campus. PS. Woohoo, good close game, but we won
Stevens Institute of Technology just put up TreeNet, which lets us log in from our laptops just about anywhere, especially outdoors. It's called TreeNet to represent those things you usually only see outside: TREES! Basic idea being to get the pasty white geeks OUT of the dorms and spend some time outdoors... Hey, if they can Quake in the sunlight, better than Quaking indoors, ne? No one on campus plays Starcraft anymore *sob*
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
Umm, we implented a similar system years ago. It has nothing to do with wireless access.
http://www.netreg.org/
-aaron
Vilk, from the ranks of the freaks
You're wondering how a cell phone would use the 802.11-based wireless LAN? I think PDAs would be in the same boat -- something powerful enough to do 802.11 should also be powerful enough to run a light-weight web browser. The only email-only PDAs I can think of are those two-way beeper-type deals.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Carnegie Mellon has had one for years. Can you get a Palm Pilot to connect to it? Nuh-uh.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
What's great about that? Many NYC firms and plenty of schools have already been doing that. I was involved in a pilot program 2 years ago at my school where they deployed a small wireless network.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
RPI has had Wireless implemented in the student union already and is going campus wide this summer. The school even loans out free wireless cards when you enter the student union building. Why is this news???
You can read more about the security they implemented in Security Still Up in the Air.
They basically used iptables to allow the wireless MAC address onto the wired LAN after the client had been authenticated off a Kerbros server.
Hey, I go to Berkeley and I don't think we have it. Would you care digging a berkeley.edu page about it, or you prefer to correct your statement (e.g.: only one building/doesn't radio count?/I made that up)
I graduated from there a year or two ago, but when I was there, it _WAS_ a federal depository. And yes, they did allow access to anyone. They always asked for a student ID when you came in, but you didn't _have_ to have one. They made it difficult for others to come in and look around, but anyone could if they were persistent, without breaking any of the rules. They just didn't want everyone to know about this.
Otherwise, you can just stop moaning about something that probably won't hurt you at all.
After all the nuclear tests, chemical contamination, car exhaust, and unnatural living conditions we experience in modern life, the best thing you can come up with to complain about is radio waves? Give me a break.
If you really think radio waves are going to "heat up your noggin" you can wear a metal helmet. The electromagnetic shielding effect is the same thing that keeps your radio from working in a tunnel. And after that, I suggest you pour yourself a nice stiff drink and worry about something that actually has been proven to hurt you... like all that car exhaust you breathe every day.
Some people!
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
The University of Alaska Juneau http://www.uas.alaska.edu campus has had wireless for over a year. It supports palm, Apple Airport, and several other protocals. Every building has at least one antena, and some, like the library, have several. The coverage and service is excelent. All you have to do is register your WNIC with computing services, and your on the air. All in all it's pretty sweet. Oh and did I mention connected to an OC3? (This is a school with 3000 students enroled, and even less with laptops)
Maskirovka
I work for Apple, and the whole campus is wired like that! There is almost 0 dead zone in all the buildings!
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
i just finished the wireless job in my house. NO if all my friends has wireless nics lanwars would not be such a wiring mess!
Of course right after I move off campus they decide to go and this. They need to extend the net a quarter mile off-campus so that my apartment would be covered... Chris G. chrisg@resnet.gatech.edu
- Hey Anthony, what's that tape on your nose for? - Exactly. Bottlerocket
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
On a side note, I say good for Tech. When I was there, I started the IFC committee to get ethernet into the greek houses (it eventually went into other non-university houses as well). Tech has always had some cool network stuff going on, so good for them.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
Now imagine if you will, a professor who took the time to wander through that large classroom or assistants along with the professor who monitored what was going on during the exam instead of sitting back reading the latest news instead of doing his job
People are people and they don't neccessarily need a wireless device to cheat on an exam as they've done so for years before computers were even used in school, so this argument to me is a bit meaningless.
I will take note though that some of these campuses are overspending budget funds by purchasing some of these services (Internet based) I mean think about it on a reality based level, do you need a T1 or even a fraction of one coming into a college dorm? Sure they need net access to study but a better method would have been a reimbursement based plan to pay what they use, this way tax payer dollars stay down, colleges can purchase more, overspending is cut down, and abuse doesn't skyrocket.
Where in the world is SpeedyGrl
360 degrees of Karma
When they find out the cellular phones heat up the noggin because of the not-neglectable power these beasts emit - what if I have to sit day after day in an area where they add more and more frills and thus more and more electromagnetic 'waste'...?
I wonder when GaTech (or someone else doin' the same) first gets sued by an ex-pregnant student/employee that gave birth to a negatively-influenced (as not to say mutilated) child... Sigh. Need a loong sommer somewhere in the wilderness...
Use The Source, Luke!
Far as I know, all Berkeley has is a deal with Metricom for Ricochet service. Much slower than what we're talking about here, but on the other hand you can go all over Berkely/San Francisco with it.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Drexel has had a wireless network for a while also but in September when they officially announced it, it covers a Metropolitan Area Network to include MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine in East Falls and MCP Hahnemann University in Center City, both of which Drexel operates. They network requires a 128-bit encrypted wireless Ethernet adapter that must be registered with Drexel's IT department in order to access the network. The network gets speeds up to 2.5 Gbps and will eventually be connected directly to the Internet2 which the dorms are already connected to. That was all explained in the link I provided for more information....
4 years as undergrad, 3 years as employee. I'll stick with just going to the games.
--
Never knock on Death's door.
Ring the doorbell and run
(He hates that).
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
See
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/research/SMN/index.html
I spent 7 years there in grad school. I'll take a dialup connection rather than go back. And they're always begging for money from me!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
It's nice to see some members of the government actually getting it.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
NCR then sued the students for not asking permission down the chain of command while using their Palms, following the students claim of Invasion of Privacy by guards who glimpsed (unauthorized) at their screens to determine that the students indeed were playing Quake. Pending is the reaction from IDSoftware who's latest filings show the students had not sought permission to port Q3 to the AtheOS operating system.
Shakespeare in dub
360 degrees of Karma
but i think they have a team of monkeys working on it, it all seems like pipe dreams to me. They've been saying we are getting one for months, and i've talked to people actually working on it but it seems like it will be a long time before it's anything worth bragging about. They should wait until 802.11a becomes a reality.
This is pretty neat. In fact I'm gettin some wirelss equipment within the next few days. Gonna set it up so I can use my laptop everywhere.
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
There's also some papers here and here
On an unrelated note, there's been some research on locating users using 802.11b.
I know that Ryerson in Toronto has had one for years.. The school sells pcmcia cards that are wireless 10mbs modems..
Get the idea?
POST RELEVANT SHITE.
When I was there (late 80s), the Beta Theta Pi house (right behind the main computer building) seemed to always have a scheme going involving running ethernet to their house.
Over in the dorms, we were happy to have 9600kbps dialup using data-over-voice (call it a very early DSL). Though the top floor of Armstrong had a loop of 300-ohm twinlead that got used for various purposes like a movie feed from a VCR (in the pre-CATV days) and some oddball LAN.
Do you have a reference to support your position that libraries serving as Federal Depositories are required to have open electronic access to the Internet?
It's also worth noting that an access-controlled wireless LAN is unlikely to be violation of such laws (if they exist) as long as it exists in parallel with an unrestricted method of access (such as a terminal lab).
--S
Drexel has had this for about a year or so now. Things are just now getting to the point where most places on campus are accessible. Some of the big block buildings have some trouble with signal strength in certain places, but overall it's quite good coverage, and is improving with time. Now that I am so used to this kind of always-on 11Mbps connection, I don't know what I will do when I graduate. Riccochet just won't cut it unless they get a LOT faster
What are you smoking? Do you really think there is some federal regulation which requires Georgia Tech to give a LAN connection to anybody who happens to be walking down the street? Because that is exactly what you are doing if you don't implement some sort of security on your 802.11 LAN. This stuff can go up to 25 miles with the right antennas. If you really think that this is the case, well that's well and good. But I would be very suprised if you could find any documentation for this claim that libraries are required to provide free ISP access to anybody in the general geographic area.
A paper about our authentication scheme, which is based on our campus Kerberos infrastructure. We don't need to pre-register MAC addresses, unless some other schemes.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Really... How long do you think it'll take for some student to publish his/er own Howto? Or, what usually happens is that the university, tired of dealing w/ freshmen will post explicit instructions on their webpage. Nice though, that now you can sit in a comfy chair and surf, or, God forbid, get some sun. "The yellow eye! She burns ussssss....."
...two Computer Science students were treated for broken noses and released, after a full-on collision on the sidewalk. Both students were crossing campus in between courses, and were completely engrossed in the Q3 CTF games running on their respective palmtops.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
They aren't free, but in my field (Astronomy) every major journal hs been on-line with HTML, PDF, and PS versions available for download since about 3-5 years ago. A large fraction (>80-90%) of old papers have been scanned in and are available electronically as well. Abstracts for just about every paper every published in the field are searchable from a single site by author, title, object, journal, etc, etc. I haven't spent more than an hour in the library (2 floors up!) for research for the last few years. On-line data and catalog access is also essential to our field these days.
I can't deny my twitch skills haven't increased somewhat over the last 10 years, but what you gonna do with all the free time you have now since you don't have to spend ages in a dusty 'ol lib? ;)
mh
Once something like this is in place, however, it seems like it would be easier to administrate (from a hardware/networking/cabling standpoint) than a traditional CAT5 or token ring kind of system. I doubt that the security of such a network would remain unbreached though, especially on a college campus...
__
props to all dead homiez
Sorry. Old News. Go Bears! Beat Fresno State!
There are many ways they could secure it properly, within the 802.11 protocol, without forcing users to to only use devices that support a web browser.
it surprises me that something like this would make big news, especially for a low-ranking school such as GaTech. this has been around for years at many other universities. get a clue people.
Tech is a Federal Depository Library (it's in the Federal index at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/tools/ldire ct.html), but I don't know what that means for their access rules. They do check ID at the door, but it's possible that 'I'm here to look at government publications' is all you have to say to get in without one.
--S
Does anyone know if code to do this has been published anywhere?
Drexel University is doing this too. They started putting up the 'hubs' about a year ago, so far the coverage is spotty. As for authentication, you have to register your card's MAC address with them. They reseve the right to intercept traffic. To make a long story short untill all the bugs are worked out(im giving it 5 to 6 years) it's gonna be more trouble than it's worth.
distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes!!!
Just to one up you, the University of Florida is "wiring" it's campus too. And we (UF) have WAY more students than GaTech... we're currently around 45,000. So, really, this isn't a big news story.
-Andy
The university of alaska southeast Juneau started their wireless networking last year. They now have 15buildings networked, and hundreds of users online. They are using all lucent equipment so can authenticate via MAC addressing. very cool stuff.
All in due time. :)
The wireless internet company that I work for has had the entire city of Vienna, WV saturated with internet access for the last year. You can visit the web site or our parent company. It's good that colleges are starting to use this technology, but it's not as groundbreaking as it sounds. We've had our service trucks and police cars wired with no problems for quite a while now.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
http://www.drexel.edu/IRT/wireless/
You do have to register your NIC with the IRT, presumably to keep just anyone from leaching off our fiber backbone.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
You're right, but I'm getting those out-of-state fees. Oh well, I can be a stuck-up, prideful GT alum in a couple of years. It will almost be worth the pain and suffering
I can't speak for Georgia Tech itself, but if it's like other institutions of higher learning, its library is a Federal Book depository. This means it has certain privileges like being qualified to house official copies of Federal documents. But it also means there are certain regulations and restrictions regarding access. One of those has to do with network access, which the new LAN setup sounds like it violates.
It makes sense to require unrestricted network access at the Congressional level, as is the case here. If people are denied access, then one of the fundamental tenets of western civilization is violated: the free access to and flow of information. Throughout history, libraries have been public institutions serving the public good by disseminating information previously guarded in the hands of the few. The Revolutionary war our nation was founded on was fought as much because of restrictive lending privileges at the Bodlean as because of the tyranny of mercantilism or Parliamentary taxation.
What are they honestly afraid of? It's not as though individuals will be flocking to the library to steal their bandwidth (which is their right, btw, under Federal law, as I mentioned). Are they afraid more vagrants will enter and disturb the delicate institutional framework they have worked so hard to erect and worked so passionately to defend from interlopers? I hardly think the incidence of homeless people traipsing in with their laptops will increase.
Dartmouth College has announced the same thing. They hope to have it operational this fall.
I expect that in two years, having a wireless network for a campus will be as standard as ethernet in the dorms has become.
Goshen College has this too. Why is this news?
-jay
CMU has had a Campus-wide wireless network for a while now. The Wireless Andrew project was started in 1994, using 915 MHz technology, and was later upgraded to 2.4 GHz 802.11-based technology from Lucent/Orinoco.
All of the academic buildings have coverage. A large portion of the outdoor academic campus is also covered. (No coverage in the dorms, though.)
For more information, see:
http://www.cmu.edu/computing/wireless/
Any real engineering student shouldn't need more than a 1.44M floppy for his/her programs anyway. Wireless, my ass, just stick a floppy in your back pocket.
When I started as a freshman, the upperclassemen were all toting stacks of cards around - now every damn kid needs the latest and greatest computer gizmo. I bet they'll all be reading /. and looking a porn on their wireless connected laptops instead of paying attention in physics lecture likey they should be.
We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.
Here's who does:
Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.
Paul
The wireless program has been around at OU for several years. We're about to upgrade to 802.11 (if I have anything to say about it) fairly soon. Our Wireless network covers the entire engineering corner of campus, part of the library, the engineering library, and the main lecture halls in our physics buildings on our southern half of campus.
--
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
In general you don't look on the journals' and conferences' pages, you look at researchers' pages to track down those references. The ACM Digital Library has a number of useful papers, but a lot of the papers were scanned in as bitmaps and so they look terrible.
My high school is talking about implementing this sort of thing. Last I checked they were claiming at start of next year. More likely later than that, but still VERY cool. Course, I'll be in college by then... Ah well.
Add Stanford to the list of universities who have had wireless internet/network access. For 4 years, or more (I'm pretty sure at least 5).
Casual Games/Downloads
We've already had a similar service at UC Irvine since last year. By summer of this year, it will become campus wide .. check it out at
http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinet/mobile/
I go to Drexel University and they official implemented a wireless network in September of 2000. Go here for more info:
http://inside.drexel.edu/networking/
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Unless of course they have wireless in the dorms as well, which CMU still has yet to implement (grumble, grumble).
This is news because Georgia Tech has 4 times the number of students Wake Forest has....