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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!!!"
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.
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.
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
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
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!
I work for Apple, and the whole campus is wired like that! There is almost 0 dead zone in all the buildings!
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
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!
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.
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
There's also some papers here and here
On an unrelated note, there's been some research on locating users using 802.11b.
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.
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)
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!!!
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.)
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.
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/
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
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.
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/