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Dorm Storm?
The Ape With No Name writes: "I work as a network technician at a major Southern university and we are gearing up for what is lovingly called "Dorm Storm," aka the weekend the students return to their dorm rooms, ethernet connections and BearShare. We'll move in approx. 3500 students, install and configure 1500 or so network cards and troubleshoot hundreds of circuit, switch and routing problems over the course of the next two weeks (with less than 50 people or so). I was wondering if anybody out in the academic computing community had some advice, stories to relate, yarns to spin for the rest of Slashdot with regard to other universities and their networking for students. You might think you have had a hell of a time setting up machines for users, but this becomes a Sisyphean task when you face a wireless, IP only, Novell setup for a grumpy architecture student on a budget Win2K laptop - one after another after another!"
all non-Greek on-campus housing was wired with 10baseT LAN
I suppose all the Greeks went wireless then?
It's got something to with pressing the right buttons.
Heh. Buttons.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
Come 'on - you can get pretty decent laptops for UNDER a grand now! Thousands more?! I'm sorry that you can't afford the Cadillac, try this Hyundai model - it works just fine.
3 95 1&product_id=1242616&path=0:3944:3951:4070:56812&d ept=3944
500mhz or higher laptops are in the $900-$1000 range from HP and others. Sure, the screen isn't 16inches, the HD not 20gig, and the RAM a little low (upgrades cheaply though) but this whine is just pathetic. Kripes, mine even had a silly DVD player in it. Get your head out of the sand and shop around a little and stop talking out of your ass.
Watch your WalMart ads, that's what I did and I've got a servicable laptop without having to get a loan. They sell off last years models at fire sale prices and they work fine.
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?cat=
There was another one in a recent sales ad too, an HP model think, that now sells for LESS than what I paid for mine, has 200mhz more CPU, a faster DVD, and a drive double the size of the one I bought! Heck, I just took the online sales-ad into my local store, had them match the price, and walked out with my new toy....
This is an investment in YOUR future, don't be penny wise and pound foolish!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Geez, I'm going through that right now. I'm starting my last year at SPSU, but also my first year as a resident assistant in the dorms. After checking in all the students, the next thing we face is helping the newbies with getting set up on the network. Many do know what they're doing, but some (like the ladies and some REALLY dumb freshmen) that just like to plug telephone cords into their NIC's. Anyway, aside from them, it's not too difficult, but we only have 400 residents in 2 dorms, and maybe 50-70% with computers. It's not anyone's duty to help, but most of us do it out of the kindness of our heart (or for the affection of one of the ladies, as the case may be for some single RA's here).
Anyway, the only problem I've seen this year is just the arrogant "freshies" as we lovingly call them. They insist on giving bad advice, plugging things in wrong, using the wrong settings and workgroup, etc. Some love to run Win2k Adv Server, and leave the DNS and WINS services on...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'm an engineering major in a small school in PA, and that just won't work there! We frequently save stuff (data &c) on some of the computers in the engineering or physics buildings, and then expect to have it accessible from the dorms. It's faster just to grab the data via a dorm computer rather than transferring it to a "student folder" on the main e-mail machine. As far as doing e-mail attachments, that's a naff idea because a POP3 program has to be set up for every new user on the Macs, taking time, or the attachment has to be FTP'd to and from the public Linux e-mail server (ya, we still have a shell account system). S'pose we could use web-mail, but the way things are (the static vs. dynamic (well, semi-static) idea is already in effect) isn't bad, t'least not for a smallish school like mine. Cheers.
you might want to wait till your network connection is up and then try to download some HTML FAQs
The university I work for has DSL for students, staff and faculty living off campus, but we have to go through Verizon, the cause of numerous headaches. When the students who are living off campus arive, they love hearing it'll be 3 to 6 weeks before DSL is installed and working. There are also students who live off campus, but through our housing department. Until last year, they didn't have any way of connecting other than through modem. Last year they got DSL through us. This year, they're going through Telerama. So all these incoming students looking for help to get their internet connection setup will first call me, then I'll have to look up Telerama's phone number and give that to them. I know I'll hear back from them when their connection doesn't work.
We also have implimented Wireless ethernet in the dorms over the summer in addition to wired ethernet. Our Service Level Agreement states that we support Win 95/98/ME/NT/2k/XP, Mac OS 7.6.1 through the most recent OS X. Technically we support Linux, but only our university's release, which is basically RedHat 6. Certain students and professors also have their own SUN, DEC ULTRIX, HPUX, SGI and whatnot other boxes which are also supported, but that luckily is not something I deal with often.
We also use special software that incorporates Kerberos authentication to send and recieve e-mail. Without that software, if people are using another ISP to read their e-mail, they can send e-mail to on campus recipients, but they can't send it off campus without changing the server they're using through a somewhat obscure preferences panel. And that software is bug-ridden to say the least.
In order to get connectivity, all users must register their MAC address, and wired users on campus must also register their outlet. With the exception of wireless and DSL, almost all the subnets assign static IPs, but we insist that users configure their computer for DHCP, for network abuse issues.
Now, you can imagine how much of a pain that can be, but for the next 3 weeks, my life is going to be a blur of alphanumeric userIDs, MAC and outlet addresses. But, lucky for me, we have beefed up our staff. Now, all the "experts" (programmers, administrators and the like) in Computing Services have scheduled a few hours every day to handle the approximately 1700 incoming freshmen and in total about 6000 returning students. In addition to the walkin/call center that is usually staffed from 9am-7pm, we'll be open until 8:30pm, we'll be closing our doors to the call center so that we can only take phone calls. We are also opening two outposts to handle walkins, and at certain hours, we will actually have people going to student's dorm rooms so that they can get on the network.
Fun, fun, fun, I already can't wait for next year.
I want transparency effects. I want so much transparency, I can see the back of my monitor! http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/
My school uses a packet shaper and firewall combination. The firewall stops all incoming traffic that didn't originate from inside the firewall. Ie, i can connect to outside, but outside cannot connect in. So therefore, since i work for an ISP outside of campus, i can't get into my freebsd box to get any personal work done, while not in my dorm room(yes they block all non-originating traffic in from everything but the dorms). So therefore, Code Red would of had no effect to dorm room students, unless someone got infected on purpose. I will propose putting a limit on people, like a Gig a day or something so people won't run pr0n sites(the reason the firewall was put up).
My brother goes to WFU, and he indeed has an IBM Celeron-based laptop (with a rather large screen).
By default, every WFU laptop (all IBM thinkpads) comes with a wireless LAN card, and every dorm and campus building has a wireless transmitter in it. Every dorm room also has a lot of ethernet ports (more than the number of tenants in the room, I believe, enough for the laptop and a desktop machine for each student.)
All is not well, however: they also require some horrible Windows authentication to get onto the network, however. This authentication is tied into DHCP servers, so you *have* to logon in order to get an IP address for any length of time. Doesn't bode well for Linux users, I'm afraid.
- A.P.
"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?"
Here at Luleå University of Technology (Sweden), we don't have such problems at the start of the semester, mostly because the administration is done by students.
Administration up to the first hubs is managed by students, I am one such admin and handle everything for 100 outlets. The users bring their own hardware, run any OS they desire and we provide installation instructrions for Win* and MacOS. Either most people are capable of installing their NICs and configuring their software by themselves, or there are lots of frienly neighbours around, since it is very rare that a user comes back to me to ask for help.
I spend less than an hour a week during peaks working on the net, and usually less than 5 minutes a week otherwise.
Where are mod points when you need them...tight post lol!
I think that you should read more carefully The only NICs required for purchase were PCMCIA (For Laptops) and CardBus. They were only offering their FREE support for that list of Operating Systems. They aren't forcing anyone to NOT run Linux, they are saying, well if you can't set it up yourself, we won't do it for you. This is totally reasonable and I really think your blowing things out of proportion
This was an ask slashdot i thought. Is there an actual question here, or are we all supposed to just be in awe at the installation of 1500 nic cards? Isnt this your job?
I'd consider myself a geek, and I'm 6'5, 290lbs.
And there's a guy I work with who makes me look small.
First off, West Virginia University IT dept. is the most paranoid dept. i've seen anywhere. By the end of last year they had it so that if two computers weren't on the same router, they couldn't see each other at all. The WVU help desk charges $15 (or at least they did) for any computer that they have to "crack the case" inserting NIC's making sure a PCI NIC isn't in a ISA slot...or for that matter making sure a laptop nic isn't shoved into a floppy disk drive....yup seen it happen. For just normal OS type troubleshooting, it's free. What I've done is gone around and charged $10 for whatever is wrong. IT didn't like when they heard about this, but eventually when they saw how many people they didn't have to deal with, they didn't care. A few other notes....DCHP does save headaches....WVU's network setup is extremely simple once the NIC is in the computer and drivers are loaded. Turn computer on, open browser to any page, network registration page comes up, reboot, off you go. WVU allows Non-window and Mac OS's but does not offer support. They also tell freshman to get a 3com card. And as for being labeled the "guy who can fix my computer" 0.25% of the female population are/or are interested in geeky stuff, and half of them don't speak english. So, you can fix her computer, but not be a "computer guy" So, after that you just have to deal with beating the label of "guy who can help me with calculus"
Wait-a-minute....if the guys/gals coming in can't setup their own damn computers on the net, provided all the numbers (DNS, DHCP-enabled, WINS, whatnot) then they don't deserve to be on the net in the first place. They will only screw it up for the rest of us.
The self install guide that I got from Pac Bell when i got DSL was pretty bad that way. It didn't help that all of the "helpful screen shots" were from Mac OS...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I understand the need to have simplified tech support (every student complains about the Tech support at their school) and requiring people to use university provided NICs would simplify things, but telling people they can't share certain stuff with their friends on the network is retarded... some of the best (and fastest) pr0n access I ever had was on the university network!
Logging everything that your users access is over-compensating for the media hype on copyrights and illegal online activities... as long as it's not a restricted area (ie faculty systems or admissions office) then what's the harm?
My university provided 2 ethernet jacks in every dorm room, you paid your $50-$75/year and off you went. They began blocking some ports eventually (so people couldnt run FTP servers) but for the most part it was wide open and I loved it.
The reason you didnt have many problems with your network was because people couldn't use it to its full potential without fearing that they'd be cut off and expelled. Yay for freedom!
UW's resnet is a bit of a joke. All I can say is I'm glad I'm no longer a student.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
As a technician that will bear the sole responsability of installing over 500 network adaptors in the first few weeks of September, let me ask new and returning students for a few favours:
1) please be patient when wating for an appointment, and please don't be mad at the technician for scheduling difficulties.
2) understand that the technician has nothing to do with (a) network administration, (b) vanity hostname assignment, or (c) 'hooking people up' with free network access (it makes me fell like Jim Carrey's character from Cable Guy).
3) No, I will NOT configure your Linux box to route the connection into your other computers.
4) No, I will NOT help setup that webserver for you.
5) Please do not ask me why your cheap-ass soundcard is incompatable with the new ethernet adaptor.
6) No, a 386 does not have a PCI bus. No, I can't force it in. No, we don't carry any ISA cards, but will happily install one that you purchase.
7) The PCI cards cost $80. The PCMCIA cards cost $180. Smaller does not equal cheaper.
8) No, you can't have a vanity hostname (see 2.b)
9) Yes, this service is for 'academic use only'. Do I care if your research major is erotic adult material? No. And I don't want to know.
10) Please have your installation media handy. I don't care if it is a CD-R with a warez group name inked on the front - just have the fucking media... you have any idea of how many different versions of windows there are?
11) sorry, we do not support Linux.
12) No, you cannot run a DHCP server on our network.
13) Yes, we have a very fast connection.
14) No, you cannot use an analogue modem because the phone lines carry a charge. No, sir, an electrical voltage kind of charge.
15) No, I cannot give you a static IP (see 2.b)
16) No, I will not give you an upgrade to Windows 2000.
17) No, I do not have any Linux CD's with me.
18) No, I will NOT remove the warranty sticker. Please have your dealer install an interface card.
I am there to install an Ethernet card and install the drivers for our supported platforms - which are _clearly_ stated on all of the reading materials.
The thing that _pisses_ me off is people that complain about the cost of our network services. We run at least four times faster than cable (and download and upload speeds are the same and uncapped) and charge only HALF the price. Yes, that is still more than a regular dial-up ISP, but you are getting a LOT more value for your dollar.
I will NOT diagnose/repair general computer problems. I do not care that you've been waiting for a week because I have been working as fast as I can. Complain to my manager and maybe they'll get another technician on the job. I do not have the power to hire extra help.
Just another fustrated tech person who tries to do his best and get the job done well. We need your patience, cooperation, and support. Thanks.
:)
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
...but this is a great way to meet women. Agreed. Whenever a female friend of mine had computer problems and I couldn't help, my statement was, "You have two choices. One involves pizza, and the other involves either a tight shirt or a short skirt. Both involve standing in the hallway and announcing that you're having computer problems." Every woman but one chose to offer pizza. Women's view of RPI: The odds are good, but the goods are odd. Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.
Nor is it anything new; the first news articles about schools making computers mandatory started appearing, as I remember it, in the middle 80s.
And laptops don't cost thousands more than desktops; lots and lots and lots of laptops cost less than $3000 total.
I have to agree. As a former grumpy architorture student from UTK my class was one of the first required to purchase laptops for the program. After the first week or two we relied almost exclusively on peer tech support. Granted, we were together nearly 24/7 anyway. I mean, really, where else are you gonna find help at 3am when things decide to get flaky and you've got a design review at 8am. In all seriousness though, with proper instructions most students will know enough (reasonably) tech-savvy folks to have them fixed by a classmate if they can't do it themselves. In my experience, percentage-wise the Macs had fewer crippling troubles than the Win stuff did. Of course it helps to have decent infrastructure in place to begin with instead of the half-baked attempt to network a 20 year old building like the arch bldg at UTK.
Do what WSU does, sell cheap beer ($8/rack or so). People will be more interested in getting drunk than downloading porn/mp3s.
-- sometimes AND gates turn me on.
Well if you want to talk about liberal arts schools start with Dartmouth... they were networking student dorm rooms circa 1985.
-G
Praise "Bob"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
After all, it comes with a web server -- a dangerously insecure web server.
Alert: this is not a troll, and I am only 30 years old. (Old enough to remember when dorm room connections were almost always dial-in, and that Mosaic browser in the computer lab was the cool new thing.)
Why bother to support broadband connections in the dorms?
I may be way off the mark, but I can't imagine the technophobic, behind-the-times profs I had in school putting enough course material online to warrant a wired dorm room. And that goes DOUBLE for the CS profs... man, we used to joke about how that weird Fortran prof probably used a punch-card word processor.
But suddenly now it's an educational Utopia where all the course material and TA office hours and crap are online? I have a hard time believing it.
Personally I consdier connectivity to be as important as running water, but I don't know if I can justify it in an educational setting. There are still computer labs, and there's always Earthlink if you really need it.
It seems to me that this is being done all over just because it seems like a good idea, when in fact it may not be. If connectivity is so damn important, why don't they provide computers too?
(I almost canceled this post, it's a bit cynical even for me.)
Yes, there's a dangerous 'middle ground' of users. Those with no knowledge are too 'scared' that they'll fuck things up, so they don't mess. Those who do have experience just get on with themselves. Then there's the middle ground, the users that THINK they know how things work (let us call them 'managers' for want of a label) .. yes, they tend to be able to break all sorts of things. "Oh, I thought that was how it worked.". Bah. Morons!
Delphis
I was going about my normal networking business when a girl asked me to come over and "help with her computer." First we started with the? "mac address." Soon we were deep into "tcp/ip." She then asked if I wanted to see her bed! When we got there she showed me where the?"wall jack" was. I could?ve touched her boob if I wanted!
Cycon, is what you are hoping for?
At least the girls' dorms will get hooked up quickly that way ;)
Exactly how my uni does it. OnLine Internet, a not for profit foundation run by the students themselves, gets a small subsidy every year (wouldn't pay for 1 parttimer) to organize first-line support (people in the buildings) and do second-line support. Whatever thay can't solve is usually bad switch/router configuration of the Uni itself.
Pay is not necessary, the students get some expense money for the hardware to operate student hosting, file-sharing and supporting services, and they consider it to be a 'hobby on somebody elses expenses'.
Don't Belive it!!
It doesn't work, I spent 3 years in that role. you spend all your time wishing, and women just use you when they need their computer tweaked,
or you get called at 3 in the morning when you are locked in a killer death match of quake by the cute blond who wants to check her email and can't rember how to dial in. or the 4 in the morning call "My computer crashed and now I can't print out my paper due at 8am", and if you are really lucky they are only calling one at a time.
True Story: I was walking one through the removal of the stoned virus when another "computer friend" called needing to reinstall windows becasue of the MTE Encription virus ate Her hard drive.
I have never cleaned so many word-macro viruses in 2 months as I did my senior year.
Hell now I do the samething, but I make $85 an hour and I don't get the idle flirtations.
(thought I do miss the free pizza and beer)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some people are alive, only because it is against the law to Kill them!
Its true, about girls being scared of non console games...
My ex-g/f was almost in tears when I beat the hell out of a scientist with a crowbar in halflife.... of course I was ROFLMAO, but she was nearly crying! *notice the 'ex'g/f... I wonder why?*
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
We have 300+ switches (48 ports each) for ResNet. Less than 20 field service techs and 5 netadmins for all of campus (800+ switches). Be draconian.
Allow www/smtp to ResNet and all your time will be spent dealing with CodeRed and open mail relays. Enforcing registration of MAC's gives you a user responsible for every machine. Handle bandwidth by bytes alone, don't dig into the protocol layer.
A friend of mine who lived in my dorm here was a really big sitcom-episode-trader kind of person. Simpsons, Seinfeld, Titus, Family Guy, etc. He was running some form of Gnutella clone, and he somehow managed to exceed 87 gb uploaded in one month. The network folks sent him an email kindly asking him to quit it... and he taped it to his door, with the big numbers circled. =)
Need to upgrade the peer to peer programs to stay within the campus network whenever possible. Why waste money getting porn and mp3s from other colleges when there's plenty available at your own college (and doesn't use up the much more precious WAN link bandwidth).
The sun of research does not rise and set on courses syllabi (had to look that one up ;). A student can use tons of research materials on the web to expand their learning. Geez - I use Google everyday and haven't been in school for ... uh ... a really long time now.
Yea, that's a great solution until you have to work on a project with one of your profs. You want to share that file with him/her? You've gotta mail it to them?! That'll go over great with the prof when he gets 200 excel sheets in his inbox because of that statistical anomaly that showed up in the experiments. For heaven's sake, at least allow access to ftp servers from both. Then all the student has to do when he has sat down with the prof is log into ftp.university.edu and download his data.
It always seemed to us that you need a two-stream system - either sign up for an appointment and have your hand held with the appropriate delay, or just get your hub port reset and be given all the relevant addresses. The IT chap could spend an hour at the start of each day dealing with "fast track" applications, who'd then have to wait until the rush had subsided before they got any more attention if they actually didn't know what they were doing...
Absolutely! And make sure to install that handy dandy webcam on their computer. Especially if there are possibilities of lesbian action!
Sex, Cars or Computers? or Should We Be Together? - it's all the same to me.I keep current copies of bootable CD's for as many distro's as I can. It comes in handy VERY often in college settings (lots of people like to try new distros/OS's, and lots of people screw them up).
Heh... at my last job, we put in a high-speed printer/copier, networked via an Axis print server pod connected to its parallel port. To configure The Axis from the Macs in use there, you had to send it some info in a text file (as a print job) within a certain amount of time after it was powered on. It would lose this config info if the power went out.
Every morning for the first few days after the printer was put in, the company called me to tell me it wouldn't print... I'd cycle the power, resend the settings file, and it would be fine. By the third day we figured the cleaning people must have been unplugging the Axis' wall wart to plug in their vacuum, so we put a Post-It over the outlet saying "Don't unplug this!"
The same problem continued for the rest of the week (so I concluded that housekeeping staff was illiterate), but went away when we replaced the power outlet's wall plate with a locking box so the plugs could not be removed.
This was the perfect way to meet chicks. You'd meet a girl, and she'd start saying how she wishes her internect connection was working. You'd get her #, stop by, fix it, and voila! Another friendly face to add to the list
Of course, once all of her friends found out, you'd get home and your voicemail would be full of messages from girls who couldn't get in touch with anyone at the helpdesk, and would do *anything* for you to fix it.
Thank you, understaffed help desk.
I gotta have more cowbell.
Ah don't feel so bad R-man, it's only a joke!! No need to weep!!
Something most of the replys here fail to mention is actually being able to do WORK over the network. At school (CMU) I can read my email in pine while using Solaris-based graphical design tools, all on my win2k desktop. That's much better than having ten times as many expensive workstations so everybody can finish their projects.
Only on Slashdot can that comment be "Insightful," as opposed to "Funny"
The girl called you at 1:30 in the morning - she wanted to see you. Instead of looking down on her because she was high, you might have just tried to have some good discussion and be friendly.
A good discussion?!? Bullshit. If she couldn't even walk straight, she probably could barely even talk.
As someone who has had a lot of experience with people who use mood-altering substances, I'll say that people who are stoned usually say a bunch of annoying and stupid stuff that only other stoned people would find funny. It gets tired really, really fast. That's just something you have to understand about people who don't use mood-altering substances.
This girl may have issues with intimacy, and a little understanding in her favor may pay off, but it will probably end up as a wasted effort until she sobers up. Hope she would talk to you when she does.
-----
Obviousness is always the enemy of correctness. -- Bertrand Russell
Now, UNT (watch those radio call-letter jokes, folks) has a good population and more than Marketing and Accounting fall under business. Many students from various disciplines take classes from the Business department. I know...now.
Yeah, it's not as bad as having to configure BearShare for the hapless, but tedious, laborious work it was, nonetheless.
To pass the time the group of us (working in Technical Support for the B-Dept) would try to find out which female would be looking to get married soon -- ranked, of course, by the madien name and how "unfortunate" it was. Then, we chose which males would be most unlikely to marry, based, again, on the unfortunate nature of there last names. Thousands of little diskettes...all hand labeled...I'm sure the bosses wondered why we'd suddenly burst out laughing...
One other incident - a student continued to access the campus BBS (run on the Univeristy's VAX) with phony names and would troll the boards. (Gee...why does this sound familar?...) Anyway, we warned him that it was against system policy to sign in as a psuedonym once you were found to break etiquitte, especially. ("Carl Marks" was one...not real bright this troll). Anyway, one night he logs in under a psuedonym (we traced the connection to his dorm room) so we thought we should teach him a lesson. We called the residence hall and spoke to the resident assistant and told him that this student was improperly accessing the BBS, and would he go to his room and tell him to stop breaking the rules (the phone was busy -- dial-up access back then). The RA misunderstood the severity of the situation and called campus police who raided the poor guy's room, shouting, "Hands off the keyboard -- step away from the computer." Don't know if the guns were drawn... Wow. They thought he was hacking into the administration system or something. Hilarious, but not at all what we intended. Sadly, he withdrew from the University after this incident.
(maybe he's lurking Slashdot now...Hello? Carl? you there?)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Find some of the more tech savvy students who have to do "work study," send them out to take care of simple problems like configuration tasks. A self-help guide might be a good idea as well.
One of my best seminars, in the religion department (not generally considered to be the most wired bunch), made excellent use of an internal newsgroup: each week, each student was required to post a 2-3 page equivalent essay on the topic of the week. Additionally, if we had opinions on other people's papers, we were expected to post these; and the professor posted feedback in the newsgroup also. Sensitive folks could use email instead, but I don't think anyone did.
That was back in '97 or so.
My best (or worst) experience was my final semester at Kent State University. Shortly after moving back into my dorm, my current Windows box decided to quit on me. Since I decided that getting new parts would cost just as much as a new system, I decided to get a new system, and swap out network cards to use the campus network. Turns out that this was only the beginning of my problems. My network card (a $50 3Com card) was not compatible with the new hardware. I had to purchase a new network card (a cheaper one) in order to use the network. The network staff was very helpful in working with me to get my problems fixed, and even they learned a few things from me.
Second, our boss was very clear on "no hitting on a customer" after issues the year before.
Hey its me, the guy who caused those issues. Trust me, the 3some with the twins was worth the "issues". Sure, I got fired, but it was so worth it. And I think they're still confused about what RJ-45 _really_ is!
preseason #4 baby, ALL THE WAy. can you say FOOTBALL?? can you say LINUX RULES> one of the two? oh no there go the fritos!
sup?
(I should also note, after rereading that again, I have no spelling abilities.)
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
Email me: We'll address your concerns. I've heard this about the HD before, and I'll look into it personally, even take you to see the boss, if you so wish. Sometimes the responding isn't the HD's fault, but I gather many times it is. (I work in the department, in case you haven't gathered). Also, I assume when you say Math building, you mean CS building. The "math building" is the Rolla building.
First of all, let me say Rocket and Saucer are meant for email. That's it. Simple tasks that require no more than 5min CPU time. If you need other access, use Hydra, Meteor, etc. Those machines are much better for any real task.
The dorm restrictions are stringent because we don't have the bandwidth because some morons in Columbia are too stupid to expand their connection. Also, how many of the rules are truly enforced??
The network is reliable beyond belief: The problem is that PCs are not- anyone who owns a machine likely changes their configuration weekly, if not more often by installing programs, removing them, changing components, etc.
I have no clue where you get the no crime part from, apparently you haven't been reading police reports recently. Computer crimes we don't have much trouble with, but things such as theft are getting to be a real pain in the arse, especially in the campus parking lots.
We'd love to allow access all of the time. Students are kicked out at midnight because of the rediculus system that this world believes in called "insurance." Students are only kicked out of certain labs at midnight, or over the summer. During normal semesters the labs in CS are 24-7.
PS- Parents shouldn't be dialing into UMR numbers anyway. They're for student use and academics. Not general internet access. The PPP is implemented correctly- how can you say there's an issue there? The only people I know of who have a hard time connecting are those still on win 3.1, or those using cheap win modems. (Win modems in general, are cheap.) I've never had a problem, except for when the modem pool went down after a power surge.
Seriously, take a look at the other side of the story here. You've had some experiences, they haven't been great, I'll grant you. Heck, I have problems with them on occasion and I work here. Bnd if you email me, I'll be glad to sit down with you, and let you unleash any concerns you got, even if you're still swearing to never talk to CIS again. And I'll see that the appropriate people hear about them.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
Of course, the detailed instructions passed out at registration helped...
Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.
Yeah, *PI schools are just so much fun... You hear that a cute girl needs help with her computer (I was generally knowan as that strange Mac guy, so someone with Mac problems didn't have many other options), but you find out (through the usual conversation that takes place after you are offered whatever alcoholic beverages are around, in this case it was Corona) that she has a boyfriend (which just goes without saying at that sort of school). Then you proceed to actually fix the problem (which required fixing several other problems first, making the whole process seem very complicated), making you now completely unnecessary because there's always the Guy With Tools she can invite over to fix things (which I could have done as well), or the Guy With Beer, or the Guy With Annoying Music, or the Guy With Fake ID, or the Guy With Van, etc. Depending on how motivated the girl is, she can have several different guys to call on without giving them anything in return other than the chance to be near her, which a lot of guys seem content with. Tech schools can really screw people up.
Believe it or not, it's true... I found it rather odd as it was happening, myself. Oh well, it got me my first troll mod ever, so I guess that's kind of exciting. :-P
Damn! Where did you get that shirt?
I would think it might be ok if it was nestled into tuition. Yes, the raise in tuition would suck but, hey, you get a laptop.
I'll show you my dongle if you show me your port.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The girl called you at 1:30 in the morning - she wanted to see you. Instead of looking down on her because she was high, you might have just tried to have some good discussion and be friendly. Also, if she was *that* stoned, she might have a problem with dependency, which only makes it more likely that she has trouble expressing herself without getting high. A little understanding might go a long way.
Get an OC3 if you can afford it.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Everyone is excited about building the networks, but the support obligations that the network creates are another question.
Bah. It's not a problem at all.
Set up a DHCP server. Circulate a photocopy:
"Your network connection is through DHCP-addressed Ethernet.
Your e-mail address is $DORM_ROOM@$CAMPUS.$UNIVERSITY.edu.
Your password is ($DORM_ROOM * $SOCIAL_SECURITY_NUMBER) / $MOTHERS_YEAR_OF_BIRTH.
If you can't get it working with these instructions, drop out now and save your parents a whole lot of money.
Welcome to the $UNIVERSITY at $CAMPUS, have an adequate education."
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Use cards from the same vendor. Don't support any windows 3.x machines. Older macs are easy but take a variety of cards. Easy to support but hard to stock card inventory. Laptops are picky and we never got 1 card to work in every laptop. We kept a few of another brand just in case. Buy 15 extra dongles for every 100 pc cards. A trouble ticketing system is a must. A large percentage of your users will be able to get everything working on their own. Many will help neighbors. It is a great way to meet new people.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
With all these stories about how to make the network admins life easier, how about a question to bypass some network admin restrictions.
Specifically, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a place which will tunnel (PPTP or other VPN style) static IP addresses through outgoing connections. Basically, if you're connected in your dorm with outgoing only connections, and a dynamic IP, I know there's technically a way to tunnel out to a static IP and then be able to receive incoming connections through that tunnel. At $5-10 a month I bet you could get a lot of takers. I know I'd use it since my Verizon DSL doesn't allow incoming connections (for the most part).
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
The Help Desk at USU has a knowledgable staff and has handled dorm storm really well in the past. We have Internet starter kits that have step-by-step instructions to get connected, and a superb web site that can be used in any of the labs or from their parents house before they come up, to set up username / password, register ethernet card for an ip address, etc. Basically we set out to provide all the answers that people swamped us with, thus freeing up our time to work on those old 486 sx 4mb laptops running windows 98se. http://helpdesk.usu.edu http://helpdesk.usu.edu
Linux? heh. Not to mention other OSs shipping on consumer products, like OSX, win2k(terminal server, ssh) just plain idiocy.
Being the designated computer geek will *NOT* get you laid. It will *NOT* win you friends. All it will get is people calling you any time of the day or night, particularly the week where all the arts students with the crappy old computers and rotting floppies ask you whether you can recover their Word 6.0 document for them . . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well, depending on your perspective, "fat pipes going down the tubes" could be bad as well. :P
The second thing you should do is implement a structure that goes from novice tech support students to medium skill students to paid staff helpers. When the first level person doesn't know how to do soemthing, have them escalate the problem to the second tier. 95% of all problems should be handled by the first 2 tiers. If it is a really difficult or unusual case, escalate it to the staff.
The other part of the structure is to ahve a web site that people can access easily to add themselves to a queue. Give your tech support peeps access to this and use it as a way to get in touch with the cases, make notes about them, and escalate the problem if necessary. Put up posters advertising the website in all dorms and computer labs, and make it the point of contact for all tech support.
I personally think UPenn's model is very good, and apparently they have been voted one of the best Residential Computing services in the nation. For more information, check out http://www.rescomp.upenn.edu Hope this helps!
(here's a hint: make CDs full of essential software (secureCRT, Eudora, Anti-virus, etc) and distribute it to all the students. Also, give out free ethernet cables if you can... it makes everything much smoother.)
Don't get me started about UPenn and their pool of slave, er, student laborers. Back in late '92, I had a chance to bang a cute girl who helped run one of the labs (on call 24/7)... anyway, we were in her room in High Rise North, just about to close escrow, when her damned beeper went off and she had to go take care of a problem. It (along with a phone call from her boyfriend back home when we returned to her room) totally killed the mood, and I ended up never seeing her again after that night.
This is a misconception fostered by 'being a nerd' more than anything else. If you take the original posters advice and act personable, appear like you care about your body image etc then you will be relegated to 'the nice guy who fixed my computer' from there its far easier to form a friendship.
If you act desperate, act like your not interested, or just act creepy/boring/etc then your going to get the 'tool' label. Being a tool sucks, the girls will treat you real nice in case they need you, but won't want to hang out with you because your purpose is to fix their computers, not to be a friend. If you talk about 'real' crap (ie bull s**t), like their posters, then you become more of a real person who just so happens to be really useful when their computer is broken. The difference is fine, but really important. When you see them in the $BUILDING then you can walk up and inquire about the 'sick cat', 'recent concert', or any other BS you talked about. ANYTHING to start the conversation outside the original purpose. If you have a class together then get into the same study group, which isn't particularly good advice if your doing it just to pick up girls. If your involved in some extracurricular activity together then your set. The trick is to interact with the person in more than one situation and make sure that when your not actively involved in original activity that you talk about other things than, the target activity. After that is easy to invite her to dinner/party/other activity where you have to talk about things other than the computer and the class you took together.
Ok, I will shut up now, this is beginning to sound like 'picking up girls for computer geeks'. On the other hand, I wish I would have taken some of this to heart a long time ago.
i work in I.S. at a hospital and we have over 1200 printers alone. not to mention a couple thousand workstations. having more than 8 people able to go out on tickets a day is a blessing. you should be thankful -Daniel
So, believe me, I feel your pain.
dbrian
None of them even like the idea of using a keyboard as a gaming tool. Guess I'll have to buy a stupid joypad and then I WON'T be the one playing the games... They like it simple.
The only one time a couple girls cared to look for me in the CS lab, I had stepped out for a break or something like that. That was totally sad.
"Wireless : LAN
RIT had a nice thing going.. Sort of.
;)
;P Many times, I'd just plug phone cable back into my modem and use the campus' dialup instead of broadband - it was *faster*.
You move in to a dorm, or apartments with an ethernet jack, and you find a little book detailing how to set up your Win/Mac box. Course, no support for Linux, and you'd either get, "You should know how to do that, or don't run Linux." or screamed at if you called up their tech support.
(Actually, all I needed were the friggin' DNS, Gateway, etc. numbers, which I eventually got. Linux was leeching bandwidth before my Windows install.)
Anyway. Remember, if you make a little technical help instruction book, make sure there's a page with hard core info - DNS servers, the default gateway, etc.
Also, make sure you've actually got bandwidth.
We had a t3 the first year, supposedly. At times, even though it'd be 4pm, I could pull stuff off a nearby (In Buffalo, hours away) server at 1mb (Byte!) a second. This was with graphs showing network useage redlined, maxed out, 24/7.
Second year.. We had 'upgraded' to an oc3.
Well, the network useage charts were nowhere near a quarter of use, not to mention nowhere near maxed. The thing is, my speed dropped to max 20k/s.
Great, I can deal with that, four times faster than a 56k, right? I figured it might even be because I lived in an apartment complex a few miles off campus.
Well, then the fun started - the link between the campus and my complex was 'damaged'. And, instead of repairing it, they chose to make us suffer.
For the rest of the year (This happened not even halfway through the year), my bandwidth sucked more arse than a 56k.
Where am I going with this?
Well, as I said. If you make a help document, be sure to include basic, hard-core info as well, for 'power' users. Second, this has nothing to do with installation and setup.. But.. If something happens to the network somewhere, be sure to fight until your last breath to get the administration to repair the problem.
Students get cranky when their bandwidth mysteriously disappears.
on accessing the network at some address on the campus webserver. Then tell anyone who calls to get hooked up that the instructions are online at x-and-such address. Hang up immediately.
It won't help matters any, but you'll feel better for it. Plus laughing beats work any day.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
A list of connected dorms worldwide: http://www.heim1.tu-clausthal.de/studentenwohnhei
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I was thinking it'd be pretty easy to spot if it was rouge. I don't understand what all the trouble was about...
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
240 mb/day is nothing man. i need to get my warez/pr0n/mp3s! go scarlet knights!
Can't you limit the bandwidth on ports napster uses only? I don't use napster, so I wouldn't now... what port does it use anyhow?
I'm writing from a university organization which manages the network for over a dozen state universities (which is why I'm posting anonymously).
We're fortunate in that we don't have to deal with end-user support, so Joe Blow with his defective ethernet card never calls us up (and if he does, we get to hang up on him).
With that in mind, though, we still have had some amazing conversations with the network staff from various universities. I expect end-users to phone me up with questions like, "Is there anything wrong with the Internet today? Things (read: Yahoo, my favorite porn site, or /.) just seems kinda slow." I'm always surprised when I get these calls from the guy in charge of a university network, though.
We also make traffic statistics available to the universities. More than once, we've gotten angry phone calls saying that a link is acting flaky, when in fact the school had some l33T h@x0r set up a warez server on some barely configured box which proceeded to max out their bandwidth. Or a connection from a dorm just slammed from sheer volume of Napster traffic.
The good news: during the summer, the whole state system enjoys supa-phat pipe, with no-one to use it execpt for the few of us left running Quake servers. Who's yo daddy?
At ISU, a guy wrote a program to index all of the files shared on the network and then allowed people to search using a web interface. What a great way to reduce bandwidth. We had over 2TB of files shared at one point...over a dozen guys were sharing over 100GB. He wrote StrangeSearch on a Win2k box with Win32. I've written something very similiar in C#. A friend of mine used PHP and Samba. Anyone else do this?
A speech...
try being on net.work.virginia managed by sprint.. all traffic college to college goes OUTSIDE of the network then back in.. driving from harrisonburg to charlottesville is a simple route.. I81 to I64.. an hour long or so but just that one turn/intersection (23miles south, 32 miles east).. however a packets journey is much longer.. start in harrisonburg.. go south for about 60+ miles (well past the I81/I64 junction) to Roanoke, back up past harrisonburg to DC, out of net.work.virginia, come back in down to Roanoke (passing harrisonburg once more), then shoot over to charlottesville finally.. ya, what a trip. (note : this doesn't mean that I think all packets drive on state highways, just providing a rough idea of the journey by a person for those who don't live in virginia). --Loco3KGT
At my school, they just block napster and gnutella/bearshare. They also block SMTP and NNTP traffic to any servers but the campus mail and news server. I don't think it is because they are trying to be evil....I think its just because they are incompetent.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
Napster and all those other peer to peer programs were really eating our bandwidth because of all the computers in the dorms. So now we reduce the available bandwidth for those ports/programs to almost nothing during the day. We then let them do whatever they want to (within certain limits) in the evening hours until a couple hours before the new business days.
Probably not the best solution but it's working out for us.
Look 'em straight in the eye and say "This is how it is being set up, and you have no choice in the matter".
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
This may be stupid, but doesn't DHCP pretty much do this all itself?
Atleast with my router it does.
I just enable it, my computer reboots, grabs an address, and I can surf the web, no biggie?
I've done the same with MAcs, and linux...
Just make a small guide and put it in each room,
"How to setup network"
and show how to enable it on each platform,
Of course you'll always get the power losers with the 3mbs networks cards or something, but shouldn't it atleast help with most of the problems?
Wow. You must attend the University of South Carolina. That is their policy. At least, it was when I was there.
"Each student is required to bring a laptop for the duration of the course. It must have a network interface installed and configured for DHCP (aka "obtain IP address automatically") prior to the first day of class. It must have Microsoft Office 97 or later preinstalled. All lecture and assignment material will be distributed via the classroom network."
They apparently believe that students who can't follow directions and prepare in advance have no place in an MBA program. In one paragraph they have washed their hands of 99% of the interface issues and have established a performance baseline without explicitly telling people what OS to run.
As someone who actually lived there I really need to ask why the hell your network is as such--hell.
And actually, I can see why you think the students are so smart, given the messy nature with which your network is run (esp. the dialup system). Rocket and saucer were haphazard, and the computer room guidelines were so increadibly stringent. In a town with practically no crime I really don't understand why you kick students out at midnight.
Hell, rocket and saucer would tell you if you had the username right or not if you had an invalid login...
--Someone who is sick of explaining to his Parents that the reason they can't dial into UMR is because they can't decide between PPP and SLIP or get either one working reliably. And sick of dealing with the barely-know-anything people in the Math bldg that do comp help desk.
Sorry, I really needed to get that off my chest (since I never ever received replies from UMR helpdesk staff).
If any of you guys have Cisco switchs then you can use Vlan Management Policy Server. It allows you to assign students to vlans based on mac addresses. I designed a system built around this switching feature. When a student plugs into a dorm port, the first packet they send triggers the switch to look up their mac address in a central database. Barring an entry they are dumped into a fallback VLAN where I position a DHCP, DNS, HTTP multihomed server. The DHCP assigns them a non-routable IP address to communicate with one side of the box. I then instruct them(through check-in documentation) to open their browser. I wrote a tricked out named.conf, that no matter what domain they request, it always returns the IP of my server. Thus, they will connect to my server and I can collect information, including their Mac address from the arp cache...they fill out the form and their data is dumped into a database, a perl script is called to add their mac address and vlan assignment to the VMPS database(a flat text file) and fire out a SNMP packet out the public interface to tell the VMPS switch to grab the VMPS file and refresh it's tables. Viola! Totally automatic...we were having trouble keeping up with the volume of activations, so I had to think of something(there are 3 of us for 3500 ports, and 2 are student aides).
I agree. My answer would be that there is only one *supported* configuration. You can use our NIC, Windows 9x, NT, or 2000, and we have a first-call, first-served policy; or fix it yourself.
The users should be allowed (even encouraged) to run their own OS, but restricted from putting up servers just like most ISP's AUP's dictate. No one can run DNS, you can only run DHCP behind a firewall (and if it leaks, your IP gets shut off until you procure a clue.)
are you going to 'configure' their answering machine and coffee machine. or how about carrying their books to class.
..... and I can only imagine the dangers of setting up a lava lamp without tech support.
ohhhh
Heh! My department would fall apart if the Uni banned *nix machines. Most of the Professors use either Linux or Solaris, I use Linux on my workstation (Dept. Sys Admin), and all of our graduate student computers run Linux (We're cheap, the hardware is old and Linux run much nicer that Win95 which the best these babies could handle). We'd be bankrupt just buying licences for all the copies of Windows we'd need (Not to mention the faculty and staff rebellion (well ok, I'd actually be the only on to notice on the staff)).
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Its not that they are stupid (though at times I tend to believe so) but they are more afraid of students that know more then they do. Luckly at they time threatened me I was moving out of the dorms so I told them to kma.
Better not try to attend the University of Oklahoma. They've been running a laptop enigneering requirement for the last three years. I've been skirting the edge of the requirement all this time, but I remember a day when Computer Scientists and EEs and Mechanical Engineers could bepend on powerful lab computers, rather than the underpowered $3,000 machines that they require freshmen to use (since they require a certain type with certain never-powerful-enough-for-engineering-but-great-fo r-the-business-college features it only gets worse as the machines age.)
Geeze, I used to sell these laptops from the University Computer Store, but I've yet to see a real benifit to students. I've always stuck by scrounging and cheap-o parts, but then I'm not in the Mommy-and-Daddy can pay for it income bracket (I wish I were, though...) The original pilot program for the laptops was flawed anyway: they gave a bunch of civil and envriomental engineers students cheap laptops that they could take out in the field when making measurments and doing homework and (surprise, surprise!) the students really loved it. When you spend a lot of time in the lab/library writing papers and researching stuff on big (+$30,000) machines, these laptops loose a lot of their value.
Yet it's still a uniform requirement for engineers at OU. I can't begin to think how many poorer students (with good engineering skills) are being shut out of thie major University right smack dab in the middle of the third world nation of U.S. states, Oklahoma.
Sad...
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
ya know, restricting bandwidth is great and all, but if my school took it so far as to actually track WHAT SPECIFIC FILES i was using my bandwidth on, I would be pretty pissed...whether i'm doing things that others find morally objectionable or not, said others have no right to invade my privacy to check.
1995?!? Hate to break it to you, but you were not one of the "earlier schools" to do this... CMU had standard net connections circa 1990, MIT even earlier than that, I think. Of course, if you mean that Lehigh was one of the earlier liberal arts schools to get a clue, well, yah, ok then :-)
Who whould have thought that computer geeks would be Very Big Guys. I wonder what their football team looks like????
I dunno. I'm 6'1" and 240 pounds. The two SysAdmins sitting in the cubes on either side of me are bigger and more muscular than I am. I think that it comes from all that work trying to physically move the old Dell Poweredge cube servers or from loading a Proliant 3000 into the top slot of a rack.
RJNH girlfriend caught RJNH looking at porno sites to learn about love making techniques. He became obsessed with the gay sites and could no longer have an erection for his woman. It's a trajedy. His cornhole is ready for all takers.
Give them NO info. Don't answer phone calls for the first two weeks. Tell them nothing. Log the IP addresses of the ones that figure it out first. Sell their names to industry for a premium. Then help all the rest get going. That will help us to weed out the weak ones.
I attend a Large Tech univeristy (engineering, cs is the reputation of the school) and we have the pleasuer of have a computer department that really supports the free open unmonitored internet... they refuse administration requests to monitor anything, block napster, etc... true they do use the throw bandwith at it, it will be ok approach to dealing with napster type issues.. but really that is the best way, expensive but thats why I pay $200 a year for eithernet (10bt) but 3.5 OC3's.. its still flyes... man its great!
I haven't done it at a University but I did something similar in the military. An Air Wing (apx. 800 people) moves to a bare base location. The only thing there is a mile of concrete, the runway, and electricity. 4 days later we, understand the we as about 8 of us, had an operational data network and an operation voice network, spread out over about 2 square miles. Phones mounted all over the place, inculding the foxholes, with voice mail (Sorry can't take your call being shelled now:) About the only place I didn't put a phone was on an airplane. Could have done that also, field wire is an amazing thing. For the data side, three servers, apx. 75 PCs and a hand full of Suns. A secure and unsecure network. Ohh, the link out, satalite, gotta love the latency. Brings a whole new meaning to field work.
I agree. "Technical Support" Staff remains severely under-staffed as well as lacking in essential Hardware/Network knowlege. Good FAQ's require experience Technical Writers to use languange appropriate for "Newbies" & Power-Users simultaneouly -- Extremely difficult to accomplish
I couldn't agree more with this. We had a "movement" (read: Adminstration pushed plan with the backing of some "students" who basically were in it for some more scribbles on their resume) a few years ago on the campus I am currently working/studying on. The plan, of course, was (eventually) for all incoming freshmen (regardless of their degree program, how ridiculous is it for a theater arts major to be required to have a laptop?) to pay some $xxxx amount of money per semester to get this laptop.
Now, let's make the (rash and perhaps partially correct) assumption that mommy and daddy have enough money to foot the bill for this little toy. Well, it turns out that like many Universities, they lacked the infrastructure (or even the _plan_ for infrastruction) to support 2000 new students with laptops. Furthermore, they lacked faculty support (CS department wanting to know why student who spend most of their time hacking on Sun machines were going to need laptops), student support, and though I wasn't working for the IS department here at the time, I'm guessing IS support. So, after a "campus meeting", during which a few gamers expressed their glee that now they'd be able to play a kickass game of Quake in freshman Physics lecture, the "decision" was may to delay the plan's implementation while they "studied the issue further", or some such nonsense.
Why do I say it is nonsense? Because the very next semester, the pilot program had already started (with, you guessed it, theater arts being one of the pilot degree programs). And to add to the foolishness, under the nose of nearly everyone the science and engineering college is requiring little WinCE gadgets for all incoming freshmen (which, of course, ended up requiring the IS department to give those little toys to all their staff members this summer _just_ so that they could be able to support them). Nevermind that the "plans" for using them are little more than vaporware (I'm told that one CS professor has some software developed over the summer to use in lecture notes in the CS Intro series, but other than that...), or that the wireless network on campus won't be anywhere near adequate to support a couple thousand people for another year or two. Oh, did I mention the WinCE pocket rockets run around $600 a piece?
And why do we have these lovely bits of technology? We're told it's to "make the University more competative with other schools around the country", but it's not the faculty, staff, or students who want these things. It's the administration with their "technology makes education better" mindset. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that if you introduce technology to an educational setting the quality of education automagically increases. Then again, these people often haven't set foot in a classroom for decades, if ever in a non-priviledged situation, so their experience with that kind of educational environment is lacking.
The point? Students don't _need_ laptops. In my experience they're more of a pain in the ass for everyone, rather than being a benefit. They cost too much for the average student's budget, and most professors don't know what to do in order to make them valuable in terms of assisting their course plans (putting notes in PDF form to reduce photocopy costs really doesn't count). Support for them can be a pain (unless everyone uses the exact same system/software combo, which seems like a pipe dream to me), assuming you can organize any at all (it was amusing to watch the IS folks play a game of "not it" when it came to WinCE gadget support).
In short, Friends Don't Let Friends Support Manditory Laptop Programs.
That's fucking insane. I hope they wake up. Isn't it ironic that Linux is being put into the category of a commercial tool and Windows isn't.
Strict guidlines are good but these "network administrators" had their heads in the sand or perhaps somewhere even darker.
Of course, whoever run this network was a obviously a bunch of jack-booted microsoft thugs whose hobbies include generating mountains of logfiles.
What I want to know is which unix was running the workstation that ran Perl to analyze all that crap.
"Spoken like a person who's never had to do tech support."
Spoken like a person who has no respect for his users.
There's a fundamental difference in philosophy here. One camp would suggest that the tail wags the dog--the network admins get to say who can use the network, and how the network gets used, because it's their job to keep the network up. The other camp--the dog-wags-tail group--would acknowledge that they A) are working at a university B) would have no power if it weren't for the users they serve and C) only really have to deal with a single mad rush for a few weeks at the beginning of the year. These people would have to begrudgingly accept a few rough weeks at the beginning of term as a part of the job.
Yes, users can call tech support with stupid/unanswerable/unsupported questions. Yes, you can simply refuse to answer those questions. Yes, these users still take up a call. How many times do you think they'll call back if you tell them no?
I have worked tech support, and I do understand the frustration. However, I also know that imposing arbitrary restrictions isn't the answer. Sooner or later, your users will figure things out, and if your restrictions are too imposing, someone will be clogging your lines with complaints, instead of questions--or worse, calling the dean to get you canned. Being draconian is never a winning strategy.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
So who's responsible when one of your high school helpers burns someone's personal computer up?
I'm not trying to be rude, I'm curious. I'd be very worried about liability for things like this.
load "linux",8,1
you also have no network security, at all.
it's kinda funny. last time I was up in Ottawa, I sat down in front of one of your lab computers, and gave a three-finger salute. much to my surprise, the tasks menu appeared. I thought "what can I do?" and tried running telnet. again to my surprise, the machine complied happily and I surfed to my domain and checked my email.
it ran netscape too. you guys really need to download TweakUI and use it. really really need. ;)
can't remember the name of the campus. it was the one that's close to U of O.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Well, sort of... Lehigh had low speed connectivity in every room well before ethernet was installed everywhere in '95. True, Lehigh wasn't among the very first to get wired for Ethernet, but I'd estimate it was among the first 40% to do. It's also an "Internet II" school, which most colleges are not part of.
And LU's a "liberal arts school"? Wha? The Arts & Sciences college at LU is only about 1/3 the university. And the Engineering college is also about 1/3 of the school. Heck, the athletic teams are "The Engineers". Some liberal arts school!
Go Lehigh!
--Thad '99 (same year as Hrunting...)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Much like a newborn puppy...
The line is drawn at support. We'll let anything connect, but we won't send someone out to help or provide support over the phone (unless there is a jack problem, and once we've tested that the jack works, we're hands-off) unless they meet our rather stringent minimum requirements. These requirements are OS (Windows 9x+ or Mac 8.6+ only), hardware, NIC (we only support three brands) and general workability - in other words, the computer has to work. We only support problems relating to the user's connection to the network.
I've been working here three years now, and aside from a few pissed-off students and parents, we've had no problems. When someone does get pissed off, we point them to the documentation we sent out well before the school year outlining our minimum support requirements, and they usually shut up pretty quickly. We do have our "problem users," but their numbers are steadily decreasing proportional to the nunber of PackBells and older Win95A machines we work with.
InigoMontoya(tm)
This signature is self-referential.
As any real net admin by now can tell, I've never run a network involving connections to other networks; don't really understand the DHCP protocol; and have no real idea what I'm talking about. But I'm fairly certain that there's a solution to that problem to be found.
Besides, it's very nice to have a network set up for DHCP since then when clubs try and run LAN parties, all the club netadmins have to do is set up a DHCP server running on the LAN party LAN and then all the incoming people who know just about enough to cart their computers over and not much more can just plug into the network and go without worrying about network settings. This solves the problem of trying to give out IPs and watching as the people go back to their dorms with the LAN IP and can't get back online.
This is extremely helpful when various dorms are on different subnets and will try and route packets to a non-accessible gateway if left to static settings.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Man, I remember when my school of 30 000+ students was served by just two T-1 lines. And that was just 8 years ago. . . I'm starting to feel old.
-"Zow"
try being a girl tech and bending over and crawling to check ethernet connections under peoples desks.
you'll make "friends" fast. whee.
A friend was berated by a student last week after a said student maxxed out his download quota and the account was locked. Apparently he was doing "vitally important research". The guy backed down when given a list and asked to identify which pR0n and MP3 downloads were so important to his course.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Each dorm room was configured for two residents, and thus had two phone jacks and two switched 10/100BT ethernet drops.
The guidelines were as follows:
- Windows only (Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K)
- Desktops *had* to use a campus-provided (free) 3Com NIC
- Laptops *had* to use a campus-provided 3Com PCMCIA/Cardbus NIC (not free, but only $50)
- The NICs were distributed with the MAC addresses already recorded and configured into the DHCP servers. Thus, the user always got the same IP address.
- "Academic file sharing" (windows file sharing not requiring a password) was welcome. Warez was not. Napster, etc were blocked, but all outgoing requests were logged and investgations were made.
- NICs had to be plugged directly into the wall jacks, no hubs, switches, or routers. The LAN level switches monitored MAC addresses to enforce this.
- EVERYTHING was logged at the switch and router levels. Violators *were* contacted, warned, and often expelled.
Harsh, perhaps. But I can't recall a single problem aside from a few intial NIC driver issues (which 3Com and the university were able to resolve quite quickly). Verbose, step-by-step installation procedures with screenshots for every modern version of Windows were included with the NIC. Free installation and setup was also available.Thankfully, the rest of the university was a pleasent blend of Windows, MacOS, Linux, and commerical Unix. "Housing and Dining" was the only department with the Windows and our NIC only policy.
Had I not lived through it, I would probably bash and complain about such strict regulations. But, hey, it worked. Bandwidth was plentiful and the LAN was always up.
That isn't not having a clue about computers. That is just flat out not having a clue.
We make students sign a contract before we work on their PC, that if it is damaged, they assume all liability. We technically have no staff to fix student PC's, our IT staff manages lab computers and servers. Student computers are not our responsibility.
I was condemned to this for a while, but then I wisened up... "Help! Help! My computer turned into a blue fungus and ate my room-mate!" "Gosh, I don't know what could be wrong, maybe so and so knows how to fix it (intense glare from so and so). He's much better at this sort of thing than I am."
www.netreg.org
All dorm rooms have two ethernet ports. When a student plugs in, they are taken to a registration page (regardless of their destination) where they can register their machine and assign a DNS hostname. They are then free to use the network.
How did you pull that off? What DHCP/router trickery did you do to make the web browser automatically go to the registration page upon browser launch on the new network? It sounds quite cool and useful, but I can't for the life of me figure out how you did it.
Not all of us are incompetent, but you're not going to get an argument from me that some are...
The brain drain here at the constantly-renaming-itself division that includes the main campus system administration has been pretty bad. Maybe if they paid a competitive wage we could actually keep some of the smarter, more competent people and wouldn't have to hire people who know they can't get a job in industry. Fortunately, not all of us work for the same boss.
It was a..accide...mista...tit.
It could be Syracuse, but we haven't started yet. I get to go back for "training" on Saturday.
(if you are at Syracuse, you'll have to let me know who you are)
-
"I would rather be all wrong together, than all right in different ways."
Ponder that statement and how it reflects the military mindset.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Two disagreements:
"8. Use 10-Mbit hubs or switches in your dorms. This will keep the rest of your network (100Mbit?) nice and tidy from P2P traffic."
This is only true or relevant if your internal network bandwidth is the limiting factor in P2P transfer rates. Assuming that all or most of your students' P2P file transfers are going to/from off-campus systems, the limiting factor will be your outside internet connection anyway. Unless you have >= 10Mbps connectivity, of course.
Also, well-implemented switched ethernet will isolate the rest of your network from intra-resnet and resnet-internet traffic.
"9. Keep a close eye on possible haxors. You know how to identify them, the kids who bring their own Cisco routers to school. They're the ones who are going to bring down your gateways."
They're also the ones who'll probably be your best CS students and future networking employees. Don't alienate or be rude to students just because they're technically adept.
Try the same thing for 15000 users. I did on a local military base. The only problem I had was some of the officers were a bit nervous about allowing contractors in top secret areas, so we'd stand around for 2 days waiting for approval we already had (plus i have top secret clearance anyway). Our military is pathetic. Certainly not the best and brightest. More like the slow and insane (WATCH OUT FOR THOSE BLACK CHOPPERS OVER YOUR HOUSE).
OK, you guys are really starting to make me feel old. Here goes the old geezer lines...
"When I was in the dorms, we didn't have no stinking ethernet - the only ether we had was for gettin' dates."
"Whadda' you mean 2 phone lines? We had one crappy line and felt grateful. Besides, it was a good way to hit on your roommate's dates."
Seriously, I worked for Academic Computing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the early 90's. Everything that the students had then was crap. It started to change just as I was graduating, but I was the one who managed the lab in the library that had 30 green-screen encrusted Zenith XT's with dual 5 1/4 drives.
Of course, you could use the mac lab which was better stocked, but the students (or BDU's) never could figure out that they had to get a 3 1/2 floppy and only use the macs.
Of course, now all the dorms are wired, and the campus is interconnected with fiber. A couple of years ago, I had a chance to go back and visit. I went into the rooms where the VAX's were installed, and saw 2 new additions. There on the floor were 2 beige-box clones running linux, replete with stickers. What were they? They were the firewalls for the dorms! Apparently it occured to far too many students that the proper use of their new-found bandwidth was running a porn site!
Too funny...
Alvin...
Only if you're ugly! Oops, sorry...
You know I was tempted to buy one of the geek shirts and then one day I was waiting for the bus and saw a guy who had the "fsck" shirt and realized how stupid I would look. Talk about looking like you have no life.
This reminds me of what I did a few times on Michigan State campus for fun. Personal machines on the MSU campus have hostnames of the form .user.msu.edu, where is derived from + . So it's pretty easy to figure out enough of a person's real name from their hostname to look them up in the campus directory. So, once in a while, I would read my webserver log, figure out where whoever was looking at my webpage at that moment lived... then walk over to his room, knock on his door, and say, "Hi, , how do you like my webpage?" Really freaked a few people out that way.
Last semester my roommate and I had trouble connecting to the net in the dorms. We checked out the info on ipconfig and it showed a DHCP address of 192.168.x.x (where it should be a non-local IP), so we called up the Help Desk, and he suggested it could be a rogue DHCP server, which we hadn't even thought about. So a ping -a results in the person's alias being shown as xxxxxx.resnet.*.edu. So we look up the alias xxxxxx in the campus directory, and find out their name and phone number. We give this info to the Help Desk person, he finds where they live. We figured we'll just let them call and take care of it, but then decide what the hell? let's do it ourselves. So we go to the second floor and proceeded to help out the poor girls who where upsetting our precious net connection. It turns out the Gateway included a wonderful program on their computer for a home networking setup, which included, you guessed it, a DHCP server. As she only had one NIC, the DHCP server didn't even work! My roommate and I got rid of the program and did some other troubleshooting on their computers. Other than the one girl being pretty cute (but not intelligent in the least), it was a waste of 3 hours.
I'm sure this has happened to a lot of techies out there, but I have to say it, because I was ready to explode with laughter when it happened.
We got a call from one of the new freshmen coming in saying that he couldn't connect to the network. We asked the usual round of questions..."Did you follow the guidelines on the 'Network Instalation' sheet?" "Is everything plugged in...is the network cord plugged from the wall jack to the Network card in your computer?" "Is your computer on and running?" He was getting insulted, because he said he came from a high school that was "pretty high tech, at least compared to here." So, I got sent over as a tech.
I got there, didn't get anything other than the DHCP error messages that said that it couldn't find a network to obtain an IP address. So, I checked the back of the computer quick, saw that things were plugged in, then ran to the room with the hubs to check that his line was connected. It was, and so I ran a line check to make sure it was the correct line. That too passed the test. I didn't hear of any other complaints from anyone else saying that they couldn't connect, so I figured that the NIC was probably bad. I opened up the computer and was about to take out the card when I removed the cable from the NIC, only to notice that it was simple phone cable, not an ethernet cable. I told this to the freshman, and got a "well, it fit in just fine, so it must have been the right cable" response.
As soon as I left his room, I exploded in laughter and laughed all the way back to the CS department.
Actually, you're not that far off.
When I started college I had a 486/133 with 16 Megs of ram, a trident 1 meg video card and a 1.2 gig hard drive. I was on Win 3.11 until I found out that the university I was at would only support Win 95, so I upgraded to that.
Oh, I should mention that this was only... 4 (?) years ago.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
Certainly most users doesn't even know what a radio button is (or at least that the name for the "you can only pick one buttons" are radio buttons).
I know how much of a pain in the a$$ this time of the year can be. I just got asked to be on a comittee of students to discuss a better network for our school. we are rather small, but being a private school, the money can be there if the right people are convinced about things. i guess what i'm getting at is what do you feel is a must for a university network setup? 802.11? T1? there is a system in place, but its not good at all. the upgrades will need to be of the longer term type. any help will be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance -purple monkey dishwasher
well, if you're using groupwise, you're best bet is to make sure that you're GWIA and webacc are configured so that the users can get to their mail via a normal web browser. everyone ( or just about ) knows how to point their browser to an address and fill in a simple form.
the same goes for NIMS.
as far as client side goes, it really depends on what their machines need to do. if DHCP is all, setting that up on a win box is easy enough to work with your network (assuming that you're using a Netware 5.x system with IP working).
if your back end is IPX, you definitely need Netware's IPX/SPX client software (IIRC, 4.8 for win boxen), which is a rather simple install, if not time consuming.
if you're doing drive shares, easy enough. make sure that your NDS config is set up to do group shares with user constraints (assuming that you have the login scripts set up for that, and not using nwadmin [ugh]).
and, if you have to have special applications for various whatevers, please oh please, pray that you either have a good Zen 3.x setup or that you are moving to one. it'll make your life so much easier.
so, in short, DHCP over IP (if possible) and forget the IPX to IP gateways. Zen for application pushes. and for goodness sake, if you use BorderManager, patch it to all get out, or you'll get the phone call load of AOL.
and the Irishman took the fly in his hands and yelled, "spit it out!"
Be more concerned about the ones that bring someone else's Cisco routers with them.
Obviously, you block those fucking hippie kids who are trying to steal your bandwidth. Little cocksuckers. Think they can steal music and programs and get away with it. Filter everything but port 80, and make sure you block all those disgusting porn sites too.
Summary: mandatory laptops = kicking poor students in a vulnerable spot.
Freedom: "I won't!"
As just the "guy who can fix my computer" I even knew a certain Epson 740i mac driver that kept me going back to this girl's room. Torture to be just there when you're too introverted to make that first move :)
That's when you demand that ThinkGeek create a new shirt that says "I'm introverted. Please make the first move for me." and wear that when helping girls set up their computers.
Other than that, I'm heading off to college in a week and a half and be taking both my Mac (OSX soon) and my PC (win2000/OpenBSD) with me, and will undoubtedly help everyone else out of the goodness of my heart. As long as they give me caffiene.
- Joe
Your chick likes to give blow jobs wimp.
Here at BU everything is set up via DHCP--making it very simple for students to get up and running quickly. They also have a work-study where you can work for ResNet during the move-in weeks, assisting people with their comps, etc. Foruntately, most of the larger dorms have their own support staff and computer room, so it's not hard to find help. And yes, when you fix one girl's comp., you become labeled as the "computer-fixer guy," which doesn't exactly get you laid.
May to September is when we get the chance to make huge changes with a major inmpact. All of the resnet upgrades take place during the summer (and that means jumpers that aren't seated right get discovered at the beginning of the fall semester), and it's easier to do major connectivity outages during the summer when most of the end users are gone.
itachi
Oh yeah. Here at , we have been switching from ATM to Gig-over-fiber (please don't laugh). The best time to start doing this has been during the summer (When we have somewhere around 4,000 students, and not 22,000).
And it's not necessarily the abuse, it's simply the changes. We've worked on upgrading to a new version of the Novell client, got a new IBM Host for our mainframe, and we're trying to figure out our problems with our current off-campus ISP for those of us (read: students, faculty, and staff) who live off campus and who are not lucky enough to live in DSL-land.
All in all, it's been a busy summer as we try and keep up with technology. This is why there will be quite a few changes as the students come back to Stillwater (all 22,000 of them. God help us.)
I especially agree with this. Anything to help the geeks get some :)
Too bad showing off one's geekiness is a good way to reduce one's chances of getting any...
"Oh great! my computer is working. Oh look, an IM from my boyfriend. He'll be visiting almost every weekend. "
Not that this sort of thing ever detered anybody from helping out some hottie - hope springs eternal.
I was a frosh last year, and signed up for my ResNet over the summer. A few interesting thigns I noted: 1) In the first week, before everyone else, connected, speeds of 500k/s or more were common. Once everyone was connected, 100k/s was almost unheard of. For the record, my school didn't black Napster, which was a very comman bandwidth use at the time (sigh, remember when Napster didn't suck?) 2) More advanced computer users often lend a hand to more recent computer folks. As soon as I set up my late model PowerMac G4, 19" monitor, CD burner, scanner, etc etc and started teching out, I became an instant target. Out of the 50 people in my rex, I must halve held more than 10 hook up. I even helped a friend of a friend of a friend of a guy in my engineering program set up her Mac, after my name and phone # had been passed down that entire chain of people. I'm sure that the paid installers have a hell of a time ("what's a DIP switch?" "Is ethernet the same as a modem?", etc etc), but I think for the most part, students help each other out a fair bit.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
We install the cards for this reason: most users are not competent enough to do it themselves and most users don't want to do it themselves. Each students pays a technology fee at UTK that supplements the price of the Card (really nice 10/100 3Coms) and installation is free. We provide instructions for the install and the drivers. I suspect you are part of the small crowd that can't wait a couple of days and tried doing it yourself. That's fine,, but don't insinuate that the process went poorly because we did/didn't do something. Installing hardware in a computer is non-trivial unless you are using those USB NICS, and in that case, you wouldm't have got to use that Redhat distro after your downloaded it.
That's because you're a fat bastard.
Ah yes, and I remember some 16 years ago when UTK only had DEC terminals to use. As for money to operate, I think the students should pay a fee for their use of the resource. Say what you want, but not having an ethernet connection does not interfere with higher education goals.
Getting no response, I kept downloading. I became curious about where this great connect was from, so I tracerouted to it and found that it was some big university and they named the routers with meaningful names like WILRES01.XXX for Wilson Residence Hall or whatever. I pulled up the University's web page and found the dorm for that router. The user naming scheme was also easy to translate into the girl's real name. (Her Napster ID was Goddess something or other.) Pulled up the student directory and there she was. So I ended up messaging her with something like saying "Thanks again (first name), Wilson Hall looks like a really cool place. Hope you are enjoying it there." She never responded so I assume she was out for the night and left her computer running. Probably got back to her dorm and saw all these messages waiting and freaked!
To point out the obvious, girls respecting you is nothing to write home about. They won't want to see you again because they respect you so much. You mean girls like to get respect (and respectful attention), which is true but quite something else.
do what my school did, "schedule" people for service turn-up about a month into the school year :P
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
But without our condescending attitudes we're nothing! We can't just silently pretend to be better than them!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I don't know if it's the best way to do it, but it worked and depending on the day the student's form was delivered, they would know exactly how many days until they were connected. Keep in mind this was a simple wire-only IP connection -- the users bold enough to try Novell would then visit a website and download, install, and setup the client. Troubleshooting was a pain in the ass, but most dorms had a few students willing to help out -- I helped my hall since it was that much faster to better gaming and file sharing. ;)
What you do then is speak to them about everything but computers while you set theirs up.
I'm sorry you lost me there. There's something besides computers? Nope sorry. I still don't get it. My brain keeps returning an 'Out Of Bounds' error.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Sorry, you're wrong. At large state universities and likely more and more at smaller institutions, online access is not only an advantage, it's _required_ for many of the classes. It's very common at UW for students to be required to subscribe to a mailing list or listserv the first day of class, and for TA's to conduct their office hours via email since we can't all jam in their mini-cube. (ah, the wonders of a state institution)
it's not just a case of over-embracing technology, we're to the point where these things are part of what allows the whole system to work. Assignments are turned in online sometimes, grades and schedules are managed via secure hhtp, and the servers house our homework.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
handing out step-by-step installation sheets (got one for Mac and PC). Most kids coming in now are techno-savvy enough to muddle through. Of course there are always going to be some that just dont' know how to do it--then again thats part of what they pay me for heh... Besides, its kinda cool to be able to help the guys out in their dorm rooms...they always give you this look of 'but you're a GIRL!' Notch one for the girlie geeks...
Your school sounds like a perfect candidate for switching to iBooks, iMacs and an Airport wireless network. http://www.apple.com/airport/classroom.html Airport-ready iBooks and iMacs are only $1,000 and the base stations are cheap to. PLUS Airport even lets students connect right to their friends Macs (when their friends give them permission to). John
It all breaks down to a few lines of service:
(1) self serve:
Students are required to do everything themselves. Life is easy for the school techs because they can support people as they need it and (when the load becomes heavy) simply point people to the fine reading materials while they wait.
(2) partial serve:
Students with more experience are hired as "assistants" who do the redundant stuff that any MCS... umm... trained mon... err... junior technician can handle. Anything out of the ordinary is handled by a trained, experienced, professional who hasn't been bogged down by the "usual" install stuff.
(3) full service
Technicians from the institution spoon-feed network goodness to all the new luse^H^H^H^Husers.
1 - low cost, high support requests, possible problems with badly configured computers.
2 - medium cost, low requests, (risk factors?)
3 - high cost, high requests, good results
I think 3 is a good option in environments where the network is sensetive to, oh... I don't know... clients running DHCP and DNS servers from their rooms... steal^H^H^H^H^Hborrowing IP addresses of others, etc.
OTOH, from a service standpoint, #2 might be the best choice. Have an immediate support person and, if a problem arises, a more technical person is available.
Work with what you have, and see where you can go.
Good luck all.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
At my school a subportion of the students are trained to help with computer problems. These students are usually work-study students, and also usually have a decent amount of computer background. While most of them are completely inequipped to deal with any serious technical problems, the student base providing top level support frees those who are more competent to deal with the real issues. In order to make sure that the students who are the "Information Technology Advisors"(ITAs) (Who don't necessarily have much prior technical experience) are qualified, they all have to come in a week and a half early, and are given training courses. While I don't have a behind the scenes perspective, the system does seem to work pretty well, and although the ITAs are very busy at the start of the year, nobody seems overwhelmed. (Plus the people who do the REAL work and who aren't students don't have to deal with individual problems and are free to run around dealing with all the problems generated by the newfound network load of thousands of mp3s and movies being traded over the network all at once...)
"You can take our lives, but you can never take our Flerbage!!!!"
50 staff for 3500 students? Man what a luxury. I used to be a System Admin for a colledge with 22000 students and there were only 10 of us. A few things you can do to make your life easier. 1) Get the students to lodge request via the helpdesk. In the request, get them to nominate Hardware, software, revisions and other related info. This will help you estimate the time of the installs. 2) Use the latest Novell clients. The microsoft novell components blow chunks. For the simple reason Microsoft has no interest in making Novell network experience a pleasant one. If you have a Novell network its a folly to run the microsoft novell components. 3) Prepare a brochure (with the authorisation of your managements) called; "Getting onto network at Uni of blah". In it, nominate minimum requirements. This is so you dont get stuck trying to get an ancient laptop with Win 311 onto a network. In addition, include some basic steps students need to do to get onto the net. Some proportion of your students would have gone to LAN parties. Give them the necessary steps and motivation and they will have the network up in no time. Leeching MP3z will get them hooked up before you can say "Screw RIAA thieves" 4) Then there is an option of payable support. But from what I know about the US education system, they allready have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for something thats free or close to in other more civilised countries. Hope some of this helps.
No, seriously. Especially if you're not getting paid to do it, but are just helping out a friend-of-a-friend kinda situation. You're doing something you know how to do for someone who doesn't, and there's a pretty good amount of downtime in between reboots and so on. It's a great opportunity to meet some new people, and mingle with the ladies.
Just don't come on too strong, or act like there's anything special about what you know. Sitting around in someone's dorm is a great way to learn a bit about them too. Ask about the people in the pictures on their desk. Ask if they have a particular interest in the artist who did the painting they have a poster of on the wall.
There's no reason that you should look at this as a "Sisyphean task" ... it's more of an opportunity to meet some new people.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Suuuuure, if you just sit there, communicating only in grunts and Tech-Speak(TM), eating her pizza, drinking her beer, then bolt when you're done, then they won't really be interested in you as a person. You've gotta show them that you are a person, and a person that they'd like to get to know.
Personally, I've hardly ever pulled in a single night, but I've done just fine meeting girls and building on that. And this is a great opportunity to meet girls.
They're not going to sleep with you just cos you can recite the IP address of two dozen warez sites. But while you're fixing their machine you can talk to them. It's surely not that difficult to comprehend....
I found the University of Texas' solution to be the best. They simply stated a few simple facts (plug in CAT5, set computer to DHCP), published the POP server info online, and let the students help each other. In the dorms, every student had their major posted on the doors (along with hometown, etc.), and those of us with CS and EE majors posted made a whole lot of friends those first few days.
As stated earlier, it is a wonderful way to meet people, especially for the geeks. I also think it is a wonderful way to begin to promote self-sufficience among the students. After all, if a university expects students to teach themselves (and each other) how to study/take notes/learn bus schedules etc., they can sure as heck expect them to teach each other computing.
Of course the admins were still swamped. But I think UT's approach to the situation was a very good way to encourage "togetherness" by solving a problem. In a way, it was what all those cheesy corporate teamwork retreats want to be... only with a lot more frustrated cursing.
It's sad because i had to have 4 visits over the course of two weeks for somebody to tell me that the wall-port was the source of my separation from AIM. call me a junkie, i was getting tired of using the java interface in the lab.
But i guess you get that anywhere you go. Rule of thumb: Support is dumb. I have to second the "geek getting some" sentiment. Nuttin quite like camping out in front of the computer lab, and waiting for somebody to say "i need to get online". I don't know that much, but i know enough to tell if the ethernet cord isn't plugged in all the way. Good times, though i never intentionally left something broken to keep my foot in the door, i just went back drunk and knocked on the door :P
|---------------|
practically an AC
At Michigan, we have a sweet system: We designed a registration program and configured all of the routers to work this special way: DHCP - when a person plugs in, they get a 10.whatever IP, which the routers WILL route, but only to 1 place -- our registration server. Using any web browser, they open up the reg page (it is what would open for any address/name typed in). They login, and we grab their MAC address off of the wire, and associate it with the username that logged in. They then are charged for activation, their room/name/etc. dumped into our database, then they wait 5 mins, reboot, and the DHCP to their real address 141.whatever where they are. Good staff, DHCP, a networking guide with step-by-steps for Win9x,2k,ME,Linux,Mac9.1,X allows us to set up over 6000 people on ethernet in about three days.
Then you need to read this!
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
I was recently brought before the office for academic affairs for distributing illegal copies of software from my dorm room. What had happened is that the BSA (Buisness Software Alliance) had contacted my university system about illegally licenced programs being traded from my dorm room i.p through a Gnutella like program. The scaring thing is that they had a list of every file (minues mp'3 and p0rn) that was currently in my download folder. My university had estimated that the value of software was over $20,000. That is with only one download of each file. (boy would they sh*t if they saw the log) I was placed on academic probation and it was permantly attached to my student record. Oh well... So what did I learn from this, study in the computer lab, download all the software that I can, and ftp to my box cross campuss.
...but eventually some of them progressed to full-blown (no pun, really) sexual harassment.
It's not harrassment if you enjoy it, and if you didn't enjoy it...man, i pity you.
mod parent up
Actually, you could probably have about 250 people if you allow some knowledgable students to act as "support specialists".
:->
Essentially take the good junior, senior, and grad students and make them an offer to be able to move into the dorms a day or two early, get a free t-shirt, and eat for free for that week... Then in return, they work their TAILs (pun intended) off for the next week or so setting up PC's for people moving in...
We did that for the "move in crew" - the people who helped you schlep your stuff to your dorm room in a laundry cart - they moved in a coouple of days early for training, etc. but it worked out well.
They got to hit the campus before everyone else, before the traffic jams, packed Wal-Mart's and grocery stores, got their room set up, and even snuck in a semester's worth of their favorite alcoholic beverages before the usual security forces were on duty
PLUS, you got to meet every hot looking chick before everyone else did... Some of them couldn't wait to get movin if ya know what I mean...
Aside from the free crew - make sure you have standard procedures set up for accomodating Macs, PC's, Linux boxes, and Laptops. Only support about 5 different interface cards. PUBLISH PUBLISH PUBLISH what you support. Anything else - don't even install it if it's in there when the tech shows up. Tell them it's not supported, and you're not allowed to install it. Tell them they can buy a supported card at a hefty discount from Academic Computing or whatever and walk out. Stick with what you know and it'll go smoothly for everyone. Just one "unsupported" install will have a ripple effect that will adversely affect everyone's appointment for days...
And yes, definately give lessons to these geeks on people skills... Flat out tell them to FAKE BEING NICE. No condecending attitudes... Tell them it will get them dates! That alone will force MOST of them to be nice.
Leave a simple survey URL to be completed once they're online. The tech getting the highest score gets a free hard drive, or some RAM, or some food points or whatever... It's cheap encouragement...
Yes, the network does change. The IT department here is upgrading from a 10 Mbps to 100Mbps line ALL OVER CAMPUS. The system is buggy now; I can't wait until 5000 new freshmen enter the dorms. I am in school now, and will have some overlap of next quarter, and from past experience the first week will be hell.
The first weekend of my freshman year was horrible. I came from home with (unheard of then) an ISDN line, and was excited about a faster connection at school. There were set time slots where you could bring in your boxen, and they could insert the card, load the (then Win95) drivers and then configure the software. Well, I bought the Ethernet card they required - $50 from the school store (rip off). Then the computer guy - they must have just asked a student to help out - he didn't realize that you had to physically push the close button on the cd-rom...not push on the caddy. We take that for granted now, but then these drives were novel, and my boxen was a franken-puter. To top it all off, we all had static-IP's so you had to get someone from the central IT to come and give you an IP address, and then turn your drop on. A better way is implemented now - dynamic IP's off of a DHCP server. Easy for connection, bad for me hosting that pr0n collection
Please email all complaints to root@127.0.0.1 and the issue will be dealt with in due time.
tell me the truth... you cannot please be please using Novell!!!!
jeez - I thought free software had eradicated them!!!!!
:-)
'Nuff said? ;-)
Heh. Well, being assigned as the sole CA (Computer Assistant) for the freshman girls' dorm was both good and bad. I mean, nubile young things giving me massages or sitting in my lap wasn't all that bad, but eventually some of them progressed to full-blown (no pun, really) sexual harassment.
Oh, the work? Nah. "I really have no idea how to fix this" worked well in plenty of cases. I would just pass it on to another CA, who might or might not get around to it. We weren't the most efficient organization, really...
Back in 1976, me and some mates set up the first computer users group at Griffith University (QLD Australia)
:)
We had just migrated to a Teletype machine after using punched cards, and, having this one machine for the entire campus (linked to a PDP-10 at Queensland University, some miles away) decidied we needed to set up a support system for ourselves and new users wanting access to the terminal, to play TREK.BAS and print out the first ASCII pr0n (Ahh, vicky.dat!)
We managed to convince Queensland Uni to allocate us some money, as a remote chapter of their users group, but befor the money became available, one of our members discovered that hitting Contrl-C during the login process would trip up the accounting system, and allow terminal use for free!
They 'traced' it to us (damn the anonymity of that single terminal) and so the support system died before being born
At the university where I work, we've been gearing up for the last few weeks. We have guides that answer the common questions for the users intelligent enough to read them. For the rest, we'll have every warm body helping with phones or going from room to room to help with setup.
;)
One of the most important bits: have a clear SLA. Be sure that you know and users know exactly what you do and don't support. At this point, inconsistency is a killer, because if one guy's willing to do more than the others, users will keep calling back until they get that one guy. If anything's changed since last spring, be sure that <em>everyone</em> knows exactly what was changed and why.
Give your specialists some cross training. Be sure that your mac guys can do basic windows troubleshooting, and vice versa. It seems like all the Mac questions hit at once. It must be a mac user group mind thing.
It's too late for this year, but automate as much as you can for next year. If you give your users access to your help database and you give them documentation, a few will check there. Set up web forms for network registration, account registration, etc.
Whenever your department doesn't do something, find out who does, and make sure that your info's correct. Students will call IT wanting to know how to register for classes online, or how to set up their telephone. That might be enrollment or the registrar or telecom or someone else. Be sure that you know, and that it's documented so that you're not sending users on wild goose chases. Otherwise, they'll call back (or worse, be referred back by another clueless department), and the second time around, they'll be pissed.
Most importantly, schedule breaks. We tend to push ourselves too hard during this time of the year. A lot of people just keep going "for another five minutes" until they pass out because they've been working for 6 hours straight without stopping for food or toilet breaks. If you've got someone who won't stop, force them to get coffee for everyone else. That'll get them away from the users for a minute, at least.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
First off, he says that out of the 3500 students invading the campus, 1500 of them will be screaming Mommy when they head in and try and get connected. This is about right for A) The incoming Freshmen, and B) The terminally stupid upperclassmen.
Also, the number of people bringing computers to school with them and thinking that the archaic 8088 XT that they just dug out of the basement - usually because their parents can't or won't let them take the high-end 486 that the family uses - might be a bit surprising. (This is of course an exaggeration, I hope. None of my friends who've been there and done that ever mentioned anything quite so drastic.)
Also, there's the fact that, while the NETWORK might be able to take the abuse, it's not guaranteed that the Network ADMINS can handle the stupidity. Super-cheap-laptop + Win2K + Novell + Wireless = Twitching Admin. I really can begin to imagine the hell of it all compressed into three days or so, because - even if it wasn't tech related - I've worked the bookstore during hell week at a fairly large University before. You can't begin to imagine the disruption of life that occurs to the people who work on campuses at the end of the summer unless you've been one.
And yes, I imagine he IS in fact crying over his lost phat pipe. =)
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
That is quite the accomplishment when all is said and done. You should take a look at large gaming events as examples:
:) Power problems, network problems, server problems, people insisting on trading mp3's and movies with there friends while tournaments are in session.
;)
http://www.langamingcentral.co.uk/
http://www.fragapalooza.com
These events usually have less then 12 hours to setup in excess of 1000 people. Some even have to deal with donated hardware, which, to say the least isn't always up to the job. (can we say coax off a 5 port hub connecting 25 more computers?
Its not easy to set something like this up, especially in a building you've never been to before in most cases. These people manage to do it, perhaps you could use them as examples.
Hint: Lots of online documentation.
I'm working campus support at the University of Missouri-Rolla and we set up a HelpDesk web site at the above link. of course, we tend to get slightly more technically capable people at this school.
128.169.131.102 - - [19/Jul/2001:19:27:48 -0400] "GET /default.ida?... HTTP/1.0" 400 327
102.131.169.128.in-addr.arpa name = SAPITS1.ADMIN.UTK.EDU.
-Justin
If you want you can use our old system, put up signs saying 'The Internet is down' and fix the problems at your leisure.
on the upside, Compaq now has its recovery disks and other stuff available for download. at least for the battered old Deskpro I use as a firewall. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I installed a NIC for a girl who became Miss University of ________ the following year. And I had her number. Don't know why I didn't strategically use it. Doh.
I'm a student at this particular large southern university myself, and I'm pretty involved in technology issues... The big thing about the routers and infrastructure being tested is that we're in the process of upgrading our entire network in addition to adding the wireless and other technologies. If we had equipment that had been around for a while, then no problem, but some of this stuff hasn't even come close to being tested under typical fall / spring loads. With our previous problems with BearShare, Napster, etc, our admins have a reason to be stressed. (We even had a DS-3 installed specifically for the residence halls after the main DS-3 was maxed out. The new one quickly hit 100% utilization. And that's not peak, that's constant.) The problem with the main post is that the admin didn't necessarily elaborate, for brevity's sake. Well, I hope this maybe clears things up a little bit.
Allen Cain
....here at Virginia Tech. About 15 teams of 5 (mostly students) are assigned a number of floors in a dorm and we spend the better part of four days installing network cards and fixing general problems before classes begin. VT tries to keep track of EVERY student's computer connection status via status cards filled out and entered into a database. Students who could not be helped before classes start due to a broken computer are helped as soon as possible and everyone is usually connected before the first week of classes end.
GetConnected team members are even given the go ahead to install NICs for those parents who just got their card from Wal Mart. Nothing causes more tension for parents than Jimmy's new pc being opened up for surgery.
I have done this for two years and have seen just about everything that can go wrong during move in. To those of you doing similar jobs this fall, be on the lookout for these highlights:
The flaming (and sparking) power supply of doom!
The notebook network card that no one can identify!
Parents that can't understand the difference between an Ethernet cable and a telephone cable ("why won't it work again? It fits in the right slot...")
Good luck to all those brave souls who will be doing Dorm Storm this year, and yes you will be only remembered as "that guy who fixed my computer" and nothing more.
Few than half of all US college students graduate.
:wq
Last year, which was my freshman year at New Hampshire College (this year we are now known as Southern New Hampshire University), I moved into my dorm room, plugged in my laptop, and amazing, it worked PERFECTLY, with no configuration. My laptop, a Acer TravelMate 602TER has an intergrated network card (Intel). The college...eh, university now, uses DHCP and hands out little brochures that describe the process of hooking up to the campus network. I thought it was really easy, then again, I am a CIS major. I ended up hooking up maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of the computers on my floor to the internet cuz no one bothered to read the brochure. *Sigh* The way they have the network setup here is really strange...it appears that the classrooms run on a Netware network, while the dorms, apartments, and townhouses run on a peer-to-peer and the networks are separated from each other. There is a T1 connection to the outside world I believe. Let me tell you, last year with the Napster stuff going on, there were NO bandwith to speak of. Trust me, when it takes 3 minutes to load www.yahoo.com or www.google.com, THAT IS BAD. Of course...the college should of had a ton more bandwidth due to the fact there is like 3000 students on campus (all going through a T1? riiighhttt). It wasn't till the college limited P2P bandwidth and blocked napster did the internet speed up somewhat...and that was to maybe 4-6K a sec during the day (modem speeds) to about 4-15k speeds at night. And don't get me started on the lab computers here...they are very nice Dell's, but whoever sets up the software on them needs a headcheck. Talk about illegal operations and invaild page faults...I swear I could never get work done in there without me or someone else blowing up about 3 computers.
Sure, students can bring their own computers, and many do, and some upperclassmen buy newer computers, but the catch is we won't support them. We gave them a computer that will meet their educational needs for the four years they're here (although that is certainly getting harder,) and that's what we'll continue to support for them. Our helpdesk and support infrastructure has to deal with no more than 4 models of laptops for students at a time, so we know all the idiosyncracies of those machines. For anything else, we provide some very prelminary documentation, but otherwise you're on your own.
It may seem harsh, but the cost of the computer is part of tuition, so there's no additional out-of-pocket cost for the student. And the model requires significantly less support staff, and lab computing than most other universities our size have. It's actually cost-effective, and we know that every student has access to a computer.
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
>9. Keep a close eye on possible haxors. You know how to identify them, the kids who bring their own Cisco routers to school. They're the ones who are going to bring down your gateways.
IANASA (system admin) but ya might want to look at getting them involved in the network... ya know, they have the 1337 skillz ^_^ (or are as willing to learn them as anyone(!)) and may be less likely to want to bring down the network if they are the ones keeping it up...
There are any number of problems with that, but it's a line of thought to consider...
Small network DHCP? The University of Texas (a school of 50,000+ students) uses DHCP for its student dorms, which amount to nearly 10,000 students (if I remember correctly). It seems to work fine for them. :)
I worked with ResNet as a consultant last year too... Here's the major problems I came across in troubleshooting PC connections to the network... I wasn't involved with switch problems or anything like that...
1) Students using phone cords in place of ethernet cords.
2) Students not having Windows set up correctly.
3) Students not registering their NIC with us (we only let registered NICs on the network)...
4) Students who registered their NIC but have a RealTech card that decides to send out different serial numbers every few minutes...
5) Faulty hardware (usually the cord or the ethernet card)..
6) Interrupt conflicts...
7) USB ethernet cards on laptops... Didn't see one that worked correctly...
8) Students installing AOL 6.x that changes all their network settings for them...
Those RealTech cards were a big problem last year... Didn't run into any wireless cards last year --- but we'll see what the freshmen start bringing up in a week or two...
I'm not sure how many calls we got from people running Linux, but I know that every housecall I went on was for Windows or Mac...
-Super
Back in 94 my university decided to wire all the dorms through the steam tunnels. Made sense at the time- there was an exit from the tunnels that ended up by main network room- just get some really looong cable and run it to the dorms, stick a router in the closet, and viola, campus wide ethernet.
Except they forgot to secure the wires in any way. And, while the tunnels weren't used to provide steam to the whole campus anymore, they still did pass near several heat sources. And you (very occasionaly) ran into racoons in there, for fsck's sake (Warm + underground + old grates = racoon heaven). The racoons tend to run like hell when people came around, except for that one poor bastard who ran into momma racoon.
First time I ever heard of a network tech needing to get a rabies shot because of the job. (Those things are vicious.)
The 'tunnels' were about 3 ft wide, 6 ft tall in most places, connected most major buildings (including the Athletic Center- great for midnight skinny dipping, but I digess), and a bunch of techs with cable ran wire all summer.
Then the students showed up. And the SF fans took out their skeleton keys, and lockpicks... and costumes.
Yes kids, AD&D in the tunnel systems is not just an urban legend or a myth from the Big U. Although no one ever built an APPASMU as far as I know.
People running around in tunnels in near darkness plus cramped tunnels plus exposed cables...
One pratfall later, you just un-wired all the freshman dorms.
It would have caused much more of a fuss, except back then, only about 30 students (out of about 1000 freshmen) had even signed up for ethernet! No one got all that bent out of shape over a blown gopher session anyway.
Then that winter, the cables running through one of the tunnels overheated. The idea that some of the steam tunnels might actually pass near some working boilers never occured to anyone, amazingly enough.
So they got a whole bunch of PVC tubing, insulated it, and re-ran the whole thing to the freshman dorms... again.
Supposedly, a few students tried running cables to various locations near surface grates to set up a WAN back in 98 or so- don't think anything ever came of it though.
While you are trying to set up accounts for thousands of students who need their pr0n, just remmeber, you could be facing down a crazed momma racoon instead.
images.google has some great links to Light Start University as well.
Also, the number of people bringing computers to school with them and thinking that the archaic 8088 XT that they just dug out of the basement - usually because their parents can't or won't let them take the high-end 486 that the family uses - might be a bit surprising.
Once a girl down the hall asked me to help set her computer up. She had just gotten it shipped from Hawaii, and it was still in the box. I unpacked it and connected all the cords, and turned the switch on.
"Welcome to Windows 3.1"
She had paid $60 to ship the thing, easily twice what it was worth. I felt bad.
Why not contact those students that know networking stuff that attend the school already. Set them up and have them help. There are certainly ways to give them perks if you wanted to. Also, many people would do it for the challenge!
I wouldn't be so harsh about most of your policies, if you didn't also mix in a number of shortsighted, non-benificial rules in there as well. What the hell do you care what the user does behind his/her dorm-room port? Are you filtering packets? Blocking ports? Yes? Then it doesn't matter if Joe User wants to set up a single windows PC, or establish a 10 computer NAT network in their room, hidden behind a linux firewall. Second, why would you want to alienate technically savvy users by requiring them to use hardware or software different from what they already have? If a Joe User can do his own install, do you care *what* he installs? Of course not!
Spoken like a person who's never had to do tech support.
Any user whose install doesn't go *perfectly* or who doesn't know how to install/configure network gear will be asking tech support for help. If there's one and only one allowed configuration, there's one and only one way to set up one's network card. Tech support is easy.
Allow arbitrary hardware and software to be used, and you have a geometrically increasing number of configurations that your tech support staff will be asked to troubleshoot.
Only give tech support for sanctioned configurations? That won't work very well. Joe Idiot will say, "But I paid to be on this network! Set up my machine!", or "But it's *almost* the sanctioned configuration! Now tell me why my FooCom 7 card is barfing!". Joe Linuxd00d will say, "Um, sure I'm using Windows. Help me debug my firewalling rules.". Even if you hang up on these people, you'll still get the calls.
The university's networking department has to deal with all of this crud on a budget that is almost certainly far too small. I have no problem at all with them restricting hardware and software for machines connected to the dorm network drops - they're paying for the network infrastructure and support, so they have every right to say what they'll let people do on the network.
My university has a unoffical policy not allowing students running linux (or the like) to access the network in the dorms. The claim since linux has services (telnet, web, etc) it violates their policy of not allowing students to run commercial services on their network. Because it is unoffical the end result is them just harrasing the hell out of anyone they find running it and shutting off network services to their rooms. But then again I think they might just be paranoid and severely bored.
You're not any safer on a dynamic address if you have halfway decent networking equipment and a savvy admin. Hint: ask the right router for the MAC address, then ask all the switches for the right port, and stop when you find a port that doesn't lead to another switch.
If your admin has done his homework correctly, there will be a solid mapping of switch ports to patch panel ports, and in turn the patch panel ports to drops in various rooms.
There is software out there that will do this for you, and (of course) it's GPLed, so it may already be in use at your favorite educational institution. It was written in one...
Very few people go through our CNS department at Illinois Tech... We still use static IPs, but there's absolutely no registration. We also have around 1500 available IPs for 900 students, and are probably using around 1100 on average.
Of course, they might have to start limiting bandwidth due to budget cuts... I can see it all now: "Effective immediately, every hall will have internet access for only 10 minutes every hour." And if they ever try wireless, we'll have to beat them down. --They tried DHCP 3 years ago, but couldn't keep it running.
Fellow students will always be the best help for new students.
I lived in the dorms 2 years ago. They sell a really cheap NIC, it was like $9. The only problem was that they didn't have or give us the drivers for it. I gave up after about 2 hours trying to get it to work, by bringing disks to the library to find the drivers. I managed to really fubar windows in the progress. I ended up formating and reinstalling. Then dropped the computer off to them to install and setup. Got it back the next day and it worked(bastards wouldn't give out the #$&^in driver disk so I could do it).
When I went to pick my computer up I watched them stick the cards in and use a drivers disk they wouldn't give us. They had LOTS and LOTS of computers to install because of this. They were working on computers for a good two weeks and regularly throughout the year when someone would get a new computer. Hopefully they are smart enough to provide a drivers disk with the NICs they sale this time around.
A month or so later, I had fun downloading a redhat iso from the local sunsite. It took me longer to burn it then to download it... =)
Wow...even poor college students can afford a better computer than me.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Well, one day, I noticed that our favourite luser was up to his old tricks again; logging in using stolen usernames, writing programs to tie up resources, flood the network, store gigs and gigs in /tmp, etc. I messaged him and politely asked him to stop it. He wouldn't. In fact, he was pretty cocky about it. "You don't know who I am, and you'll never catch me!"
Imagine his surprise when 3 Very Big Guys [tm] from the Computer Scient Club knocked on his door and said "stop doing that." I guess he'd forgotten, in his excitement, that he was now on a static IP, and doing an IP-to-physical room translation was pretty easy.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
I don't think the network topology changes, but I think the asker of the question is referring to helping out new students who are using ethernet for the first time. Remember, 90% of the US is still using dial-up and many freshmen don't know what the Internet is beyond AOL. They have no clue what an ethernet card is, despite it already installed on newer desktops, or built-in the newer laptops.
I know this is the case at my school last year when the freshman dorms were finally wired for ethernet. I felt sorry for the people who had to help the incoming students install NICs and deal with IRQ conflicts and what-not. In addition, my school allows only static IPs to each port, so you have to fill out forms and wait for someone to "turn on" your port.
Dorm storm is definitely not a fun time. As for the porn pipe, you don't have to worry about the "fat pipe going down the tubes" once the coeds are back on campus. w00t!
Rangers Lead the Way!
Make all of the Dorms DHCP while the classroom and administration buildings are Static IP, then seal them off from each other. The only place both should have access to is the school mail servers. I work for one of the top five wired schools in the nation, and students can only see other dorm shares. Students use Peer2Peer or just run through Windows shares. It runs most of the time and issues only really arise from ground seep taking out major wiring and occasional lose of our connection to the outside world from unexpected circumstance.
Wizardofod
Once the LANLord of the Slums, now just a low rent vigilante.
UTK was my first exposure to broadband and while setting things up was really rough in the early years (giving random students off the streets static IPs and an armload of floppies for the software and drivers required a lot of help for lots of people) the speed was phenomenal. Kind of like DSL in microcosm, now that I think of it. I've not had anything like it in a long time.
Thanks for all the work you did. It made my DOOM, Worms, Bolo, and Quake experiences much more enjoyable. :-)
(UTK Class of 1999)
There are many universities where admin simply gives the task to students. They build and run their own routers, wiring, etc, off one large connection to the rest of the U.
Whether or not you do that is irrelevant, however... Give some of the kids some admin responsibilities (or pay?), and let them deal with some of the simple problems. Lots of those kids can probably fix things anyways.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
While I was in the tech support department of a large university we had the same thing happen, but the culprit was an Apple AirPort base station that apparently got hit by a power surge and went rouge. My box happened to go through a lease renewal after that, and somehow the network sleuths tracked me down as the culprit. It took some fast talking to calm them down and help them find the rouge box.
Am I the only "nerd" who lifts weights? What the hell is wrong with working out between cram sessions anyway?
ResNet (with that case, even) is the name for the network there, and the timing is about right... most kids will show up next weekend. ResNet is fairly slick at UCONN, and they use the gigs-per-day BW limiting.
All coming in three weeks. I am lucky enough to be a Level II on the Helldesk (as well as a student worker). The only thing I can say is:
Get a good laptop that has a packet capture device on it. bring a mini-hub and 'sniff' out what they're doing. If they're complaining about not being allowed to get to their public shares, it'll give you a great place to look after all else fails...
Make sure that you carry plenty of 'network install for dummy' type books (ours is called a 1-2-3 book). Some of the (l)users will install most of the stuff themselves...but a lot are scared, or just don't know it.
Aside than that...good luck. I get to go through it Starting September 4.
ONU Comm Serv Help Desk
I disable sigs...do you?
Some places don't like this happening, I've been in classes(not college) where if you knew what you were doing and took initiative, they got pissed off. Plus, how do you know that the "abled" student is really abled?
I attend the University at Albany. We also have students that work for ResNet. You're right, they do have one of the easiest jobs at the school. They are provided with cell phones, laptops, and the worst is that they don't have to be anywhere. They can do whatever they want while they are on duty, and if someone has a networking problem, they get a call on the cell and then they go take care of it. I am a student assistant at Academic Computing, providing 2nd level tech support. My job is usually pretty easy, but it is nothing compared to the RNC's (ResNet Network Consultant). Whats worse is that they get paid more than me too.
I'll go back to Linux when Windows goes open source.
Does the network topology at these places change enough between May and September that it is *really* a problem of troubleshooting the network all over again? I can certainly understand installing all the cards and such for the incoming students (at ridiculous fees, of course), but aren't most campus networks already hardened against this kind of abuse?
:)
I'm suspicious, I think you might just be feeling a little down, watching your fat summer pipe go down the tubes again and all.
you're preaching to the choir
i work at my university's resnet... actually this would be my first time working here at beginning of semester. i think we provide more tech support than many major companies do. For example if you buy a comuter through college's book store, we would deliver it to students dorm. Next weekend, we, some 10-15 students, will have to take around 200 computers and setup in the dorm rooms. Then once school start, we will help install and troubleshoot more than some 1000 students. we do use DHCP but people still gets lot of problems.
Being one of the sys admins who helped right a network management, monitoring, and billing system for a major university I have had some expierence with campus networks. Hear are a few tips.
1) Provide easy to follow instructions. Both online and in paper form. Distripute the paper ones to the dorms, and bookmakr the online instruction in all the public user rooms.
2) Only support the Operating systems you have the experise for. If you only know Windows 98 and Windows 2000, only provide support for those. Don't try and support an OS you don't really know. In the end the students will be happier wil no support than really bad support that might break there computer.
3) If the hardware is the problem, tell them. Don't try and sugar coat the problem.
4) Invest in some quality networking hardware, and develop a network management system. We use Cabletron's SFS switchs. In addition we have written a complete network management system that tracks MAC-to-user relationships, as well as what IP a user currently has, and where on the network they are. Despite the complexity of this system it allows for very powerful network management. We have been able to write a number of automated proccess this monitor the network and turn off ports if the user is causing a problem. This can be anything from using too much bandwidth, to trying to hack our servers, to trying to steal an IP.
5) Finnaly, DHCP. Make all of ResNet DHCP and make sure it is all behind 1 router port. This allows you to easily block things completely from ResNet. One of things we did a few years ago to prevent open-relay mail servers is to just block port 25 to resnet.
Just a few of the things we have done to make our lives, and the lives of our customer service people a little easier.
1) Have people fill out forms early, like what OS, what brand of NIC, etc... On the form, give them tips on helping them determine such info from their computer. Require all people seeking ethernet connections to have this form on them when they call/ask for help. This will help with the redundant questions..."what OS are you running?" "uh...i dunno" "well, reboot and tell me what you see on the screen."
2) Post network info in BIG poster boards attached to the dorm bulletin boards right at the entrance to each dorm. Some genius admins have directions to getting ethernet posted on the web. That sure helps when you have no ethernet connection in your dorm.
3) Plan conservatively when making troublshooting appointments. People get discouraged when you tell them you'll send a tech to their dorm at 7:30pm and the tech doesn't show because he's still at another dorm rebooting for the 9th time. People will be surprised the tech is early and appreciate him/her spending extra time troubleshooting their connections. It's better to take it slow, get one problem done right then do quick fixes and make repeat visits.
4) Have a TOS in plain english. List programs people are discouraged to use. If you have a per port traffic limit, publish an easy link for people to check how much they've used.
That's about it!
Rangers Lead the Way!
"3. XY college students need an excuse, any excuse, to interact with XX college students. "
:)
I especially agree with this. Anything to help the geeks get some
In this vein, I'm wondering about the feasibility of an informal training session for some of the more tech savvy students, then sending them back to the dorms armed with their new-found knowledge. They can either work for free or be paid as independant consultants.
Or just get a big classroom, and have a few training sessions for everyone, so they can set it up themselves.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
When I was a lab consultant for my school, I had to help make sure all the Windows 3.1 machines could access the Banyan Vines network. Sometimes it seemed that if you even breathed funny, everything would break.
- Jonathan
Of course I prefer to use the machine configured with 128Meg/ Pentium III-500Mhz...
I totally agree. Especially for people who play games, a desktop is pretty much required equipment (laptops are always behind on the power curve). Since I already owned a desktop when I started college, I would have been pretty pissed (like, go-to-another-college pissed, for any college administrators reading this post) if I had to buy another computer just for some lame, we-are-doing-it-because-we-can-not-because-we-shou ld in-class stuff.
>> rely on the students who know what's going on to share their expertise with the ones who don't.
Yeah, double ditto on this!!! Definitely, ask for help.
1. Techies are always willing to show off.
2. College students are idealistic, and thus willing to give their time freely.
3. XY college students need an excuse, any excuse, to interact with XX college students.
Sounds like you guys are doing a laudable job of working with what you're presented. I admire your desire to do the right set of things.
Of course, in the real (IT) world the response would be to examine the configurations, declare them non-standard and unsupportable, repartition their drives to the supported config and loading the supported image. Doesn't work? Tough. Requisition new gear or declare yourself unsupportable forevermore.
Sounds like a hell of an education. What might be interesting would be to hear about any tools used in this environment to suss out the configuration of the machine and/or fix up common configs quickly.
My only words of advice are:
They are people, not users.
Most people don't care about the mechanism, only the function.
If you notice something that might hurt, point it out, gently.
If the individual decides they know more than you, work to enslave them.
Report particularly abusive people to the appropriate authorities.
Never die alone. Ask for help. Say you don't know. Chicks REALLY dig this.
it's a start - sometimes that is the hardest part to get
2. Make sure people sign out when they are going to do an install so people know where they are. Walkie Talkies for the higher level techs can be a good idea, and if you have desks spread out to the different dorms, you're definately going to want a good way to communicate. When you can't track down the Level 2 tech because he didn't sign out for an install, it's going to be frustrating.
3. When people say "I'll try to do it myself", unless they have an iMac, tell them just to wait for a while and someone can do it for them. Once you've done 50 of these, you can do it in your sleep. However, if they've severely screwed up the machine before you get there, it makes your job a lot harder.
4. Make sure the computer runs before you get there. You're job is to fix the network, not to get their CD-R drive working, not to show them how to download pr0n, or how to install Quake 3. If you fix a printer or something else, they are going to tell their friends to call your office when their printer breaks, and your boss is going to hate you. If you are really nice and fix it, make sure they know never to call you guys about it again.
5. Send everyone out with certain things: Screwdriver (multiple bits, you can get them cheap), a 50' ethernet cable that you know works (can reach across the dorm room, can eliminate cable as an option), a PCI card, an ISA card, a CD with drivers for all the cards you support. You'll be amazed how many people try to use a phone cord instead of Cat5, so you'll want the cable for sure. Bring cards that you know work so you can eliminate the card being broken quickly.
6. Remember - Computers don't always work like you think they should. You'll find that a card will work in one PCI slot but not another. That if an ISA card is in one slot but not another, the PCI card will stop working. There are a million little things like this that cause problems because you think it should work, but it won't. Experiment with things like this. Make sure to check the BIOS and that it doesn't have some stupid issues. Don't be afraid to disable something in Windows Control Panel, but ASK FIRST.
7. Since you should keep computerized records of all these appointments, if there is anything strange about the install (had to use a certain PCI slot, had to disable something), make a note of it and keep that around. This will help immensely in the future. You might do a million installs the first few days, but if you keep track of them, when you have to fix them later you will be really happy you did.
8. Laptops suck. They love certain PCMCIA cards, they hate certain ones. We had a card that IBM's would never work with, but everyone else loved. I think IBM had a deal with 3Com so you couldn't use cheap cards in their laptops.
9. Remember, the low level techs that don't know as much and cause more problems than they fix? They're very good at going and getting you food and drinks. They're beeter at doing that then fixing a computer they don't understand.
10. Figure out who knows Macs, who knows NT/2000, who only knows 95/98, and if anyone knows Linux. Keep a list so people go to a computer they know. Have people write down what kind of computer and card they have when you go to do an install for them. It saves time and makes everyone happier.
If you like doing installs, this is a really fun week, and after a day or two it gets really, really easy to do. You also get good stories:
Compaq's had the expansion slot covers soldered at 10 points on certain models. They were not easy to get off. Nothing makes a parent feel confident like you ripping off their computer case and attacking the case with screwdriver with all your might to force it open. Sony VAIO desktops had this issue as well, but they were far less common. This week also teaches you what computer makers do a great job with their computers (Dell, Apple), and those that don't as much (almost everyone else).
An. An MSCE, I see. :-P
The hosts file is the first place the machine looks to look up host names (before DNS). This gives it the effect of overriding DNS (and speeding things up). It's generally used for sites with a number of static hosts and no local DNS (my home LAN, for instance, has DNS entries for my wife's machine, my Linux box, and my laptop), or for providing an alias to a site with no DNS (or an unweildy DNS). My home machine also has a link in to our test machine here in the office; it's "domain name" is something like "bandwidth-brokers-corpis.com-fortwayne-subnet636- ip235" or something equally hideous. At home, I access it as "phdfw." :)
In this example, you add an entry that points hotmail at 127.0.0.1 or something, so that attempts to hit hotmail fail (because they go to the wrong IP address).
you were running an OPEN DHCP server,that means that ANY winblows machine without ANY configuration at TCP/IP makes a broadcast to obtain an IP.... an your server answered the broadcast
I used to do this, and let me tell you, grumpy students are one thing (especially those of the spoiled princess variety), but nothing compares to the Dad who knows nothing about computers but doesn't want to look dumb in front of his kid!
Beware and avoid at all costs.
* Please do not read my signature.
I hope this whole list of things helps - give me an e-mail at johann.klemmack@vanderbilt.edu if I can help clarify on anything.
Heck, MAC addresses can be changed on some cards. I'd just determine the address that's registered with the card, update the MAC address of my Linux firewall/NAT box, hook that up instead, and then run the other side of said firewall into a hub. Unless you're having room-to-room searches for unauthorized masq'd networks, this approach will work just fine.
Although the description sounds like you just might be having room-to-room searches, so what do I know?
I don't see any problem with advertising the supported configurations, and then just hanging up on support calls for Linux, weird NICs, WFW 3.11, etc. We used to do that all the time in university computer support.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I wish I could tell you that it's easy, that with good organization and understanding it just "does itself". But I have no idea. Dare I say you actually have an easier task... I work at the helpdesk for the College of Ed at a Southern University. There are Three of us that service about 1500-2000 machines. It's hard to be exact. And I'm talking 45%-50% Mac's. Running on a Novell network. IP's assigned from BootP. I've got Grad Students running Win95 on Compaq Deskpro 166's...up to new faculty that spent $25000....yes Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars...on new equipment. You should see the office, Post-It notes everywhere. We talk about organization, but it's impossible, the time we do have a spare moment is spent catching up on jobs that got forgotten about, or a job that you were working on and had to put down thinking you'd be back in a minute only to be out for 3 hours. We tried a web-based ticketing system, in the midst of setting up ~300 new machines over the summer, needless to say it's still a Pre-Work in Progress. At the most jobs get written down in a notebook. We've got a backlog of 60-75 work orders called in since Monday. It can be frustrating, but also rewarding...Free food from faculty, a chance to check out the latest gadget. And the experience is crazy. I've learned more in the 8 months I've worked there than in the 10 years since I've been using computers. That's not just PC's either. I know a Mac like I know the back of my hand...now. Try telling a full professor that's got written instructions on how to check their email that they have to switch their AppleTalk connection from Ethernet to Printer/Modem port so they can print and then back again to get to shared drives...Jesus. I'm looking for ways to improve the situation...sounds like I'm bitching, but I'm not, it's a great job, great experience. Anyone down here in GA need a hardworking tech with Mac/PC experience? Send me a line, you'll get my resume. Bottom line - You need people. You need a way to use them effectively. You need an up-to-date and easy to use network. Good luck to you.
TAMU will be introducing 10,000 students to the dorms next week. All dorm rooms have two ethernet ports. When a student plugs in, they are taken to a registration page (regardless of their destination) where they can register their machine and assign a DNS hostname. They are then free to use the network.
p 3 for somewhat up-to-date information (we will not be supporting the PH nameserver for more than afew weeks, hopefully).
One IP address per student is allowed. They can change their hostname at will. All configurations are done via DHCP, so any machine that can speak TCP/IP and DHCP are welcome on the ResNet.
http://cis.tamu.edu/help/resnet_registration.ph
This is sort of the classic trap to fall into. I should know, I did. It's a simple fact of life that most people are more interested in themselves than they are in you. They aren't being inconsiderate, intentionally ignoring you, or anything else. You have to give other people a reason to pay attention to you. If you sit at a computer instead of interacting with people, you are not going to get any attention. You may as well be furniture.
Learn their name, find out something about them, talk to them and be interested (even if you aren't). You don't have to like them, be friends with them, date them or even see them again. But it's good practice for the Real World, and guess what? You'll meet some pretty interesting folks along the way.
Not everyone is interested in the same things you are. Just because someone could care less about computers does not make them boring, stupid, or worse in any way. It just means they are interested in other things. Chances are good those things might be pretty interesting themselves. Let them tell you about what they like. People love this.
Most people are just as scared as you. They may not show it, or cover it up better, but it is true. Meeting new people is very hard to do. But they aren't going to come to you. Show them that you care and are interested in them and they'll usually respond in kind. Just ask questions and show a genuine interest in the responses. Will you meet some jerks? Sure. But most folks are pretty decent at heart.
Just because some folks will not be that interested in you does not mean you should just go "oh well, nobody likes me, guess I'll just go play Quake". That is avoidance behavior. You're afraid of the opinions of a bunch of folks who are mostly interested in themselves. Most folks are more interested in themselves than anyone else most of the time. You probably are too, whether you care to admit it or not. It's ok, it's normal. But it's silly to go crawl into a corner because someone acted selfishly. It hasn't been the first time and it won't be the last. If you reach out and get ignored, it's ok, it happens to everyone. But if you stop reaching out, you will get ignored. Retreating into your computer, though seemingly comfortable, doesn't solve the problem. It's no different in most respects than an alchoholic drinking to forget his troubles. Sure you'll feel better for a while, but the problem will still be there the next day because you haven't dealt with it.
i remeber back when i was a college student (4months) and the entire campus was wired (CAT7 to every dorm) through some DHCP/proxy w/ little to no access.
my last two years i built a cluster for a project and "i just _had_ to have at least 1 static IP to properly configure my cluster" (gulible admins can be persuaded to belive anything)
wouldn't you know that there soon magically appeared a comptuer of mine that resided right off the T3 with full FTP/nap and no cybernanny
easy ways to make friends with all the delightful delinquents/geeks all over campus -
that's my story and i'm stickin' to it
What in the world is linen service? I'm just about to start my fourth year at Tri-State Uni, and I've never heard of such a thing. Of course, when they got the dorms "wired", I just *knew* I had to live on-campus. :-)
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
U of Rochester???
Methinks probably not...
Go Yellowjackets... or some crap like that. Don't get me wrong, I liked UR, but "major"... eh. I guess so, but it's a bit of a stretch.
The chances of anybody actually knowing about UR and NOT being from Upstate NY are somewhat lower than we might like.
When you get to Sandburg you'll need to stop by the main desk and ask for a Network Use Agreement (NUA). Read and fill out that agreement and drop it off at the main desk, along with your $25 network access fee. That fee is one-time only, and covers installation, 10mbps network access, and a patch cable to get connected. Any other hardware is your responsibility.
You'll basically need to set up your box (Mac, Windows, or Linux) with an Ethernet card, TCP/IP and DHCP. If you're not familiar with the setup, you can bring your machine to our office and we'll set it up for you as part of the fee. When you get your computer up to your room, plug it in and start it up. When you get to a desktop start a browser. You'll see the registration page at this point. Fill out the registration page with your UWM email and password, your student ID number, and your receipt number from the NUA (if you registered within a few days).
Once you submit the form you'll have to reboot (yes, even on Linux) and then you should have Internet access. If at any point you run into a problem you can't resolve, you can call us at x4606 or stop down at our office in the Commons and we'll help you any way we can.
--
Great word. Impress your friends and use it today!
-- null
Really, I weep for you. Pucker up and deal with it case by case. It's what you're paid to do. I would suggest asking for a raise, instead of asking /. for advice.
It must've been very embarrassed if it went rouge!
Take step by step configuration screenshots for all your supported MS and Mac OSes. (for the *nix folk, just a sheet of all necessary info) Place all these in plastic page holders and then into a bright pink binder. Depending on the density of the dorms, distribute on per hall/floor/building. Let the students know they are encouraged to set it up themselves, and they'll have to wait their turn if they need personal attention. Many will be a little afraid, but will feel good after they do it.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
Oh, please. I was a philosophy major in undergrad. Give a poor redneck a chance, now and again. ;-)
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Nice use of the word 'Sisyphean'! For those of you who do not know the definition of Sisyphean:
Sisyphean \sih-suh-FEE-un\ (adjective) : of, relating to, or suggestive of the labors of Sisyphus; specifically : requiring continual and often ineffective effort
Example sentence: No one works at the Happy Burger for very long, so it's a Sisyphean task for the manager just to keep the place adequately staffed.
Did you know? The legendary Corinthian king Sisyphus annoyed the gods with his trickery. As a consequence, in Hades he was condemned for eternity to roll a huge rock up a long, steep hill, only to watch it roll back down. Sisyphus' story is often told in conjunction with that of Tantalus, another king who offended the gods and paid the price in Hades. Tantalus was condemned to stand beneath fruit-laden boughs, up to his chin in water. Whenever he bent his head to drink, the water receded, and whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches moved beyond his grasp. Thus to "tantalize" is to tease or torment by offering something desirable but keeping it out of reach -- and something "Sisyphean" (or "Sisyphian," pronounced \sih-SIH-fee-un\) demands unending, thankless, and ultimately unsuccessful efforts.
BTW, 'Sisyphian' is Merriam-Webster's word of the day today.
Announcement RJNH - sucked himself while weeping, his girlfriend was caught with his best friend, his dog.
Your number one point is a major and important one. While setting up a friends dorm at a college I spoke to the help desk and instisted to them that the actual network jack wasn't working. They insisted it wasn't working because I was setting up NT and not 95 or 98. After two weeks of calls they finally sent someone to check the jack and in 5 minutes he had it fixed. The cable to the hub in the basement wasn't plugged in. No other problems after that.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Hey, if anyone figures out how to design a network properly, let the good folks over at The College of New Jersey know.
With 6 T1s serving about 3000 students and computer labs/classrooms/faculty offices, you'd think it would be enough for reasonable Internet usage. But you're wrong.
Someone, somewhere, ensured that unless you were using the Internet between the hours of 3 am to 7 am, packet loss would be in the 75% range.
It's impossible to load even a simple webpage in anything less than 5 minutes.
I don't know what it is... A bad or poorly-configured firewall, too much bandwidth being reserved for the labs, or Satanic interference... but it's bad enough to make me want to get a dial-up connection.
To think that I'm giving up my cable modem in 2 weeks to go back there... ughhh.
My sister is attending a university that makes a laptop part of the tuition so kids can include it in their educational loans and everyone has wireless access anywhere on campus. It is supposed to be a really nice set-up.
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Pla
I do actually take exercise, but I'm more inclined towards individual pursuits (stop giggling at the back) like running and mountain biking (I used to lift weights too, but I'm lazy). When I said "Jock" I was talking about your stereotypical biceps-much-better-exercised-than-brain type. I hope that since you also recognise the value of study, and are familiar enough with Slashdot to post here, physical fitness isn't your only pursuit in life. Which, as far as I'm concerned, puts you in the "Athlete" category, not the "Jock" category. Unless you actually enjoy crushing beer cans on your head and beating on people who're smaller than you....
At MIT we have RCC's (Residential Computer Consultants (?)) which are regular student volunteers that help out throught out the year that in the dorms. They can issue IP's, give out ethernet cables, install mail reader programs, etc. They are next door neighbor tech-support. These guys are the front line to which everybody comes to. Then, we have SIPB (Student Information Processing Board) which is basically the computer guru club, run by students also. They handle all *nix related issues, like networking. They are the second line. Finally, we have the IT guys running Athena and the computing environment of MIT at large. Usually, they put together materials on how to hook up to the MIT net for the freshmen at orientation, and the guide is pretty good and thourough. They are the last line, and most of the time your problems are solved before you reach them.
I'll be doing this myself as a ResNet consultant for a major east coast university. Some quick tips:
1) If a user has crappy hardware, tell him or her so. Make them splurge for a 3com. When you're configuring that many students, if 1% of them are running cheap-ass ethernet cards that their local vendors told them would "speed up the internet" or some such nonsense, I can guarantee you'll be spending plenty of time supporting that 1% over the phone for the rest of the year. Nip the problems in the bud.
2) Definitely keep it as simple as possible. Make flowcharts. Win98? Ok, open box, insert card, driver disk / os disk, so on and so forth. Make sure everyone working gets a flowchart. Make them for the top 5 operating systems at your school. If the situation they encounter doesn't work / doesn't have a flow chart, have the consultant refer the problem to his manager. This minimizes hassles for everyone - flowcharts help your techies streamline things, and as a bonus you only get problems that require actual thought.
3) HIRE AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE. One day of training for 1 consultant for every 50 anticipated setups per week. (Our "Dorm Storm" lasts for three weeks. YMMV) Seem excessive? This is 10 setups a day - enough to compensate for the average difficult setup. More will leave your techies bored. Training should include NIC installation, different OS's, common user questions and the like. Bonus: handing out cd's with an automated installation and config program
is a good idea. Handing out static wrist guards so that someone working under you doesn't fry an expensive machine and piss of someone's daddy is a *great* idea.
4) Only higher tech support that is friendly. These people will be interacting IRL - they'd better be able to at least fake people skills.
5) Keep everything as low stress as possible. That means air conditioning everywhere (it's the little things), free coffee for techies / walk in students, and anything else that makes this massive hassle a little less of, well, a massive hassle.
6) Past five o clock, stay open with a skeleton staff, and have consultants ready to drop in on the dorm who are on call (i.e. have immediate phone access and the ability to go at a moment's notice.) Don't abuse this privilege, but do use it.
7) Lastly, be prompt. Have everyone who doesn't get serviced by flowcharts go to the first manager AND DEALT WITH IMMEDIATELY. More than 24 hours for turnaround is too late, especially with this heat. Those who can't get helped by the managers should be an extremely small group - have one more manager and/or an emergency response team to deal with these guys.
Good luck with yours... I'm at 1.5 weeks and counting...
at cal, everyone is responsible for their own hardware. find a friend to help out. First week of school, you get a worksheet in your mail. fill in your MAC address, room number, and you're up and running. Also has directions on config your own hardware/software. Problem solved. Still got probs? sign up and have a student tech come and help. easy as pie
This is a side of universal campus computing that doesn't get enough attention. Everyone is excited about building the networks, but the support obligations that the network creates are another question. Probably the best you can do is to have a really good FAQ available, and then do what everyone else does: rely on the students who know what's going on to share their expertise with the ones who don't. Could the tech revolution exist at all without free customer-to-customer peer tech support?
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Well, first off, we don't have Novell, so that's going to be a little different ... secondly, I work in a department, so I don't configure how the scheme is setup ... I just configure the machines afterwards
... however, as far as getting TCP/IP going, we procured a 2nd class B. In each subnet (255 ips per segment is how the network people configured it), the first 30 are 'temporary', the next 200 or so are 'permanent', and the remaining are reserved for static IPs in that range ...
/release and ipconfig /renew (or equiv based on os) gives them an ip in that block of 200 or so 'permanent' ips.
...
... macs are a little different, because the machine has to be powered off for a few minutes before getting a more 'permanent' ip
The routers on campus know to only let those first 30 ips (the 'temporary' ones) go to one machine (it's a beefed up to hell linux machine) on campus. On that machine, users can register their mac address and tie it to an ip. A simple ipconfig
We tell people to use DHCP aka 'Obtain an IP address automatically' and give them a small printout on how to do it, based on their OS. I say 'permanent' because so long as they are in the same subnet as they registered originally, they'll get the same ip. if they move to a different building (eg, switch dorms, or even go to a class with ether jacks in the room), they'll have to register a new ip using the same process
The last 20 or so ips, like I said, are reserved for static addys, but its not like we can really prevent anyone from tapping into them. However, when we find out someone is using them, fire up some SNMP tools, figure out which port on the switch that IP is using, pull their mac addy, find out who registered the IP, and give them a ring (a visit or turn off their port on the switch if we're pissed enough ).
That's basically how we do the TCP/IP part, but you'd have to have another scheme to do the Novell stuff.
Someone else suggested having a demonstration or something and passing out printed info sheets there
It works rather well for us. W9x through XP work fine, as do the nixens
we also have some wireless access points around campus, that are *supposed* to work the same was as with cables, but it's not looking so hot lately
Yup, that's what antisemitism is about: misunderstood and therefore personalized anti-capitalism. Capital is an abstract relationship, for god's sake, wake up dude, read some Marx.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Seems like putting a small self install guide in all the dorm rooms might be a start. At least the more tech savvy users could be up and running on their own if you give them the vital info (router, dns, etc). That's one less user you have to deal with yourself.
Not cool, dude.
:) [ even those of us who swear by it ]
At my university, a couple of years ago some idiot grad student thought he'd like to set up a Linux machine. This is one of the tools who thinks "hey, I know DOS- how different can Unix be?", the type who installs Linux because it's 133t. I believe he was running RedHat 5.2, which back then had some idiotic default configurations or some setup that made it very easy to run the DHCP daemon.
Oops. In one night at least 500 students lost network connectivity- and this was at the beginning of the school year when things were hellish anyway. My roommate noticed students' windows boxes showing "192.168.1.145" as their DHCP server. Of course pasting this into Netscape displayed the default Apache page. The network gods eventually figured out where he was and shut down his connection temporarily.
There's a reason we don't support Linux.
-Nat
The other thing that NWU did right--at least when I was a ResCon in 97-98--was the CD Installer. Not only did it install all the commonly needed software, but it had a nice graphical tutorial to walk students (or fathers) through installing the NIC and configuring the computer.
I was in one of those hard-to-staff dorms, one person supporting ~150 (I think the ratio was supposed to be 2 ResCons per 150, but the second person never showed up for training.) But all I really ran into were those odd problems: two NIC cards in a computer (the OS knew about one, the Ethernet was plugged into another), a NIC that would only work after a warm boot, half a suite in which summer construction had destroyed their wiring, a computer show built computer that--no matter where you set the date, BIOS or Windows--eventually decided it was living in the year 2197 and managed to corrupt all the networking.
We have largely the same issues here at USF.
1) We do not install NICs. Students are responsible for buying their computers and buying their network cards. The university bookstore sells them, and hence does the installation etc. support. The same applies to patch cords.
2) The first line of defense are the Resident Advisors in each residence hall. A lot of the problems can be solved within a building, without ever having to reach a help desk.
On the technical side we've done the following:
1) All addresses are DHCP. All students must have a valid email account with a department at the university, and before they can get a routable address they have to register their MAC address so we can track down who's doing what.
2) Redundant / failover DHCP servers.
3) Fully managed network, which allows us to quickly find any duplicate (stolen) IPs or connected MAC addresses. It also gives us error counters so we can quickly see if the NIC or cables are suspect.
4) The cable plant in all residence halls is certified Cat 5. Housing has been very understanding to the concept of doing it right the first time, and saving a bundle in man hours later. So far we've had almost no problems, and the logic has paid off quite nicely.
5) We use Cisco switches, and the above goes for them as well. Out of about 200 switches we've had two break over four years. The switches are managed off of a private vlan that doesn't get routed, so students have no way to get to them. This incidentally also prevents any web-worms/scanners or such from bugging the management and triggering possible bugs in IOS.
6) We scan the student networks with ISS or a similar tool regularly, and notify people of any glaring problems. If they don't comply within a reasonable time, we resort to the rules below and take them off the network until their machines are somewhat secure. This unfortunately affects linux users as much as it does Windows ones.
And political aspects...
1) As part of the lease agreement or the address registration students have to read a set of rules and sign off on them. That way we actually have leverage when someone misbehaves. We can show them the rules that allowed us to disconnect them without a refund or resort to academic discipline.
2) Traffic shaping seems to be the way to go. We're currently trying to figure out how much to allocate to whom, but there are no daily or absolute download limits. Say a student wants watch a 500k video stream of a class over I2. We have the bandwidth, but they could quickly pop any daily gig limit. Instead we just limit the total bandwidth of student connections so that researchers and staff members and such get first picks on bandwidth. Within campus there are no limits.
3) No servers reachable from off campus. If a student needs to run a server, they need to talk to their department and put it on a non-student network. Servers reachable only from within campus are okay, as long as they behave. This is filtered at our edge routers.
4) No registration of external DNS entries. All addresses under our address space are under our namespace.
5) We keep DHCP and similar logs, since we have had a few criminal cases in which someone has to be tracked down a while later. This though gets into law-enforcement and it's quite a mess.
That's Rideau campus. This is where most of the technical stuff was when I went there (93-96). Also we got all of the crap computers at that time. All the good stuff went to the Woodroffe campus which is the main campus.
I have few advices:
....
dhcp, yeah baby. nothing makes things easier than properly set up dhcp.
ok, here is what was done at the last place i was a student, and at the same time person in charge of dorm network connectivity:
- we had about 500 resident students.
- roughly 10 dorms
- 2 ethernet drops in each room [one per peson]
- fiber ring between all buildings on campus
- dorms were behind a linux ip masq box, which took care of assigning dhcp addresses
the setup could not be easier. a freshman puts a network card in their machine, hooks up to the wall, and voila.
however, we had a policy that it was not our responsibility to fix individual machines. it was your own task to set the machine properly. we provided faqs/howtos/etc, sometimes if we were not busy, we'd guide the troubled ones on the phone. two majors reasons for not helping the students on their machines:
- not enough man power/time
- we did not want to be held responsible if something bad would happen. imagine a bad network card, etc, something goes wrong with the motherboard, some settings go bezark, etc, and the student tries to sue you for damaging their computer.
of course we would give out names of people on campus who were able to help with those problems, mostly students that worked with the computer department. they would provide technical support after hours, and they were entitled to charge whatever they want. usually it was cheaper than taking the machine to a computer store. i can't remember how much beer/cigarettes i got out of that whole deal
anyway, physical network has to be there before the school year starts. otherwise you're in a big doo doo.
firewalls are good. segmentation is good. using different subnets for business and for dorms is a wise idea.
--- d'oh
You see, my school recently -- and I mean RECENTLY, as in this month -- got wired with some sort of high-speed access, and it is now installed in every dorm room. Unfortunately, the school has neglected to inform the student body of just HOW exactly this is going to work. Those who don't know much about computers (I'd guess about half of the student body) won't know to buy a computer with an ethernet card, because my school has released absolutely no information about what an incoming student should bring for a computer. No info. This is a school whose second largest majour is CG (after architecture) and we aren't being given any sort of reccommendation on hardware. Not even a PC v. Mac type deal (the school uses both). Nothing. Nada. We were just told, quite simply, to bring "a computer."
Just this evening a friend of mine who will also be going down to Savannah called me, long distance, from her home in North Carolina, just so her father could ask what she should bring. They know I have a bit of experience with computers, and wanted to know if I had any idea what they should bring. I emphasised that they needed an ethernet card, and of course had to explain just what exactly that IS.
What's worse, I emailed the school a week ago to ask what kind of services they'd be providing for students who ran minor servers ( My point is this: Mr Anonymous Ape, I imagine the sysadmins at Savannah are envious of your Sisyphean task. Not only do Savannah's sysadmins have to worry about getting an absolutely brand new network up and running (how can you stress test it for 5000 students over the summer?), but they will also have to deal with the fact that the student adviserment committee (or whoever) has neglected to mention anything about kind of HARDWARE students will need (I sure as hell hope they don't expect students to be Mac-addicts; but at this point, they might, and I'd never be the wiser!). This is going to be a rough transition for all of us (imagine, if you would, being suddenly thrust into a new world, without internet access of any kind... I never really realized how much I rely on my net access for normal communication). I will be very disappointed if snail-mail and long distance phone calls (Georgia ---> Mass) are my only options. Pity our sysadmins. =)
Good luck, BTW.
~A.
student of animation and the fine arts
'nuff said
Bad idea, you risk having stupid netadmins that impliment DHCP so poorly that it's difficult or impossible to get it working on a non-windows machine. Better to keep it as-is and have all the routers block DHCP messages.
Maybe you should qualify just exactly what "it" was.
You might look into what Arizona State has done to overcome their amazing feat: They're making it *mandatory* for business students to have laptops with wireless ethernet cards, which are then going to connect to a variety of online academic services, including those used during class. There's been a lot of news on it recently, and Google should be able to get you what you need.
Got Rhinos?
At another southern university we're going to move in our freshman students in about a week. First thing that helps is to have freshmen move in 3 days ahead of upperclassmen. Next, every new student is mailed/e-mailed lists ordercodes for prebuilt computers at Dell and Gateway that are *already setup to work with our network*! There is a small additional cost by puchasing a preconfigured Dell/GW like this, but I know Dell offers a bulk 2% student discount, so it balances. Next, in every single freshman dorm room there is a folder with generic freshman info, but it also has a CD. On that CD are network drivers for most NICs and a pre-built installation program to configure user's machines, setup a (licenced) free e-mail program, install a (licenced again) anti-virus software, etc. It also has some other things to setup users' network drives (everyone has a 10meg networked drive they can get to from anywhere on campus). We also have a station of about 20-30 people in each of the freshman residence areas. These stations are manned by upperclassman computer-geeks who get a chance to move in early, before the freshmen even. Give the students $50/each for two days of work, and it balances wonderfully. We also have students who work during the school year with our Academic Computing System department to handle tougher calls - they're refered to as "senior staff". All requests for help are logged and checked on so we don't have people sitting around. These people are available for help for over 10 hours a day for the three days of freshman move-in. We have the ACIS phone number on magnets, slips of paper - just about everywhere - to help out students. We let people know about all these resources, such as ACIS, during freshman orientation during the summer, so if people buy new computers, they know what to get. We also discourage people from getting "custom made" computers - the people who know what they're doing will know how to setup network access if they have a custom computer. If someone isn't computer savy, then this just discourages them from getting in over their heads.
>Of course, she will need to call you (assuming she doesn't use hotmail instead),...
;)
just to be sure, put hotmail in her hosts file.. Oh yes.. I am an evil bastard, but all is fair in love and war
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Congratulations, you've just become tech support to a nuch of (presumably cute) girls. Too bad that has no relationship to whether they are intersted in you as a person.
The tech would go in to the closet, move the brooms and buckets and ironing board and cleaning supplies out of the way, and find it had just spontaneously restarted and needed to be intitialized. It was like the power had failed, but no sign of any other problems, and if that circuit had failed it would have knocked out half the basement.
Eventually someone was in on Saturday morning, saw that it was down, and raced over to see what was up. I'm sure you can guess what he found...
Yup, this kid always did his laundry on Saturday morning, and he'd use the ironing board there to iron his clothes. And he'd unplug the router to plug in his iron, then plug it back in when he was done.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Don't look at having geek-skills as a way to guarantee you'll score. All it is is an opening. Other guys usually have to buy her a drink (or several), compete with a dozen other guys, get her away from her friends, impress her with dance-skills and somehow manage to charm her over the noise of a nightclub. As a geek, you get invited into her room, get to do her a favour, and have a perfect opportunity to chat to her and show her that you're an actual human being, and can be witty, interesting and smart.
And most girls (particularly university girls) really do value brains more than guys do. If she's after a jock, then you're wasting your time trying to pull her, but she may have friends who're more interested in someone who looks OK and can actually hold a conversation and make them laugh than they are in someone who's on the football team, but who's more interested in being a drunken-caveman-fratboy.
Oh, and one piece of advice - download some file recovery software. You have no idea how grateful someone who's fairly inexperienced with computers will be when you magic a deleted file back into existance from their floppy drive. A common problem that need not be the disaster it seems.
Wake Forest has an interesting program that applies to all programs, undergrads and graduate schools, and hands a laptop to every student. If a student is in a four year program they get a new laptop after the second year.
After graduation students get to keep the machine.
I think students pay a technology fee every term that funds it.
-G
Praise "Bob"
This is becuase the system that lucent put in still uses fhss instead of dsss that cisco and most other wireless card vendors use.
What was setup was an MySQL database that users can sign onto (web interface) and activate outlets and add machines to DNS and DHCP. All the user pretty much has to do is know their outlet number (listed on the outlet and available through maps), their hardware address, and what they want to call their machine.
The rest is pretty simple. Kiosks are setup near all the major dorms with help staff available. The information goes in and the database takes care of activating the outlet (by automatically connecting with the switch) and takes care of adding DHCP and DNS entries (updated every 2 hours).
This system has saved many hours of technicians going around to the network closets to activate switches, not to mention end user support. You can probably get more information if your interesting by checking out this page or emailing the Andrew Advisor.
Shoutcast.
The DNS server dropped my ip out of the table, so I couldn't collect my mail or anything as I was an "untrusted IP"
I phoned up the computer room, explained what had happened, and asked if they could fix the problem.
"We don't have anyone here who really knows about DNS servers, so if anything goes wrong with it, we just reboot it"
was the reply.
Then of course you should also thank those guys who implemented DHCP.
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Named after a man in Greek mythology who got the first recorded venereal disease, and tried to get it cured at the local HMO.
That vicious bagbiter Hippocrates wouldn't allow the leech procedure and Sisyphus spent years arguing the case before Plato and Socrates.
Eventually, Sisyphus went to an illegal back-collonade leechist.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
if you've got problems with distributing DHCP across your network (and I can well see how you might - the Rutgers network is legendary for size), there's an easy answer.
make lots of DHCP boxen. all you need is an elderly 486/P100 or so with a network card. put one in each subnet. i.e., physically locate it somewhere in the dorm: one DHCP box for each router. the routers will block the DHCP nicely.
in fact, once you get one box working, you should be able to image its drive and just change the subnet it's controlling, at least if you're using the same network card.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Firstly, don't make it look easy if you're trying to impress a girl. Furrow that brow in as manly a way as you're able. If you have an opportunity to take the cover off then do - actual physical work is always more impressive than clicking thru a windows wizard.
Secondly, don't finish the job. I know; you're a perfectionist, but just fight that urge. For example, get her connected to the network and browsing the web, but *ahem* "forget" to set up her mail client properly - leave out some SMTP settings in Outlook so she can't get her mail. Then leave your number with her (be casual - scribble it on a post-it and stick it to her screen just before you leave) saying "There you go, that looks to be working OK, but if you notice any other problems then just give me a call and I'll pop back round, OK?". Of course, she will need to call you (assuming she doesn't use hotmail instead), and after that you become the person she calls first when she has problems. And with a bit of luck she'll tell her friends too : )
Yeah, so it's totally immoral, but do you really care? Just try to act like a regular human (very few teenage girls care about how their POP3 account works or why M$ suck or what happened in last night's Gundam episode). Don't bombard her with Simpsons quotes. Smile. Take a shower at some point in the 24 hours before.
Apologies to anyone who's offended by this, but it worked for me. You fix the problems that you overlook soon enough, you get to meet girls [insert non-gender/sexuality-specific stuff here] and they get their computers working quicker and cheaper than they otherwise would. Everyone's a winner.
And remember what Kevin Smith says - "Personality counts for a lot"
You and your roomate are top class morons. I'm glad you feel that bragging about your inability to configure your computer properly makes you cool. If you had half a brain you would of configured your DHCP server correctly, its so easy an abused monkey could do it.
after installing the hardware force each student to render his or her computer over and force them do reformat with a norton ghost image The whole individuality thing is way overrated
The biggest problem that we ran into is the "my dad set it up" problem. This is where a freshmen insists that the computer is set up prefectly beacuse "my dad is good with computers and stuff". As soon as you heard this you knew you were in trouble. I actually had one student who's father had plugged a telephone cord in to the ethernet card and the wedged the other end into the ethernet port *sideways*. Needless to say the port was junked and the student didn't have internet acess for the first two weeks of class.
To top it off the girls father called my boss and complained about the poor quality of our technical support.
At the school I attended, for the dorm network ("CaneNet") it was a DHCP setup with what I like to call 'sticky' IPs...i.e. if your system was on 24/7, you got the same IP upon lease renewal. Ports in the rooms were switched 10Mbps to Foundry Networks FastIron routers, then onto a gigabit fiber backbone...from there it was an OC-3 for Internet1 and an OC-xx for Internet2 access which was open to all on the premise that 90% of the traffic would be used for research being that it's an education-only backbone for now. We screened out Napster and such, and also screened out incoming requests for Canenet located servers...i.e you could have a webserver, but it'd only be visible to folks within the miami.edu domain. Working for the IT dept. as a student-manager, we only supported Win9x and up, and MacOS 7.6 and up. Unixes, BeBoxen and so forth were allowed, we just didn't officially support them...though unofficially, we encouraged employees to take a stab at their problems *if they were positive* they could help...i.e. if the solution backfired, we'd call the employee up on it. By default I became one of the building's "resident geeks", only cause my RA told the students ... "Yeah, pod is a student manager with IT"...I really didn't relish the thought of dealing with people's Presarios, iMacs and so forth, but I had to anyway...on the upside, it gave my then-fledgling career as a photographer a boost when I'd casually mention around a pretty girl that I "had to finish this up, since i have a shoot on Ocean Drive in 2 hours..." ... inevitably led to 'I've always wanted some nice photos done of me...' hehe :)
You guidelines are a little too strict. IMHO they some aspects of it made your life, and your students lives overly hard. Basicly your requireing Win 9x,NT alienates the easiest people to support. The iMac crowd. Ever setup an Mac with a moder OS (7.6.1+)? Out of the box its set to connect using ethernet and DHCP. Some schools (UC Davis is a good example) heavily promote this, and go out of their way to support Macs. They are rewarded with lower support requirements over all. Just my $0.02
I've been a helpdesk consult for 3 years now, I installed ethernet cards for MSU students before I had my first class. This is what I do to prep my coworkers for the rush.
1. Create floppies of the 5 POS net cards that Best Buy sells down the road. Keep them around, this year I burned a CD with them and a bunch of other utilities (3c95diag, etc).
2. Tell your consultants to not worry about turning people away because they bring you their Grandma's old Recipe machine (you know, x86, 8 megs of ram, win3.1 or pre MacOS 7.0). They're job is one of utilitarianism, if they can help the old machines, try, but if not go on to the next walk-in.
3. Work with the computer store oncampus (if you have one). They can ease the pain by handing out your documentation on how to setup pre-installed NIC's for your network. Putting some of these sheets in dorms would be great, we have yet to do this however. When those tech-sav's that come by to just pick up a NIC for their GF's give them a few network config packets to put in their dorm
4. With a campus thats nearly 36 square miles we have setup multiple stations, some on dorms, one in the union, one in the Computer Center (mid-campus). If you can trust your consults to open and close a room with expensive equipment in it, do it. If they play quake 3 when it gets slow, fine, they make space issues go away almost completely, plus you look more professional and helpful when you are closer to students.
5. With over 30,000 people on campus wanting ethernet, have late phone support (we are at midnight, but ever 2 am seems reasonable). Hook up some phones in 24 hr labs if need be.
6. Mailings - Campus mail generally can put a 1 page flier in all mailboxes, put the URL/phone/location stuff on it. Nothing worse then a crying guy begging the front desk dude to setup his ethernet.
7. Block netbios access between routers. These shares KILL our bandwidth, so reducing sharing to one's own dorm, or 1/2 of it helps a lot.
8. No use in dwelling, the students will come, and no matter how much you prepare, they will overwhelm you at least a bit. Damn pr0n Monkeys.
Never help anyone with a Compaq Presario.
Hah! You thought those were bad?! Back when I was getting students on the campus networ (between '97-'99) the worst proprietary brand you could come across was BY FAR those damn Packard Bells. I still have nightmares about the wacky shit they would try to do when they would boot with new hardware in them. The day we found out about them going out of business, everyone at ResNet breathed a sigh of release.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
...why Simon Travaglia (http://bofh.ntk.net/Who.html) writes the BOFH (www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/index.html).
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Anyone having to deal wit this (turning up networks) at Univ of Wisc/Milwaukee? I'm starting there this Spring of 2002, and wondered what the fuck is what going to be like. (Campus-network setup, etc..)
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
I go to NC state university (ncsu.edu/text is where you'll want to go), and they hire students to work for ResNet, the self explanatory name of their network here. anyway, i know someone who works for them now, and it's a cush job.. geez..
listen to this, they get:
a Dell Inspiron laptop
a motorola talkabout cell phone (the ones that work as personal radios, do paging/text messaging too)
a big-ass backpack to hold it all, t-shirt, um.... $8/hour, can't think of what else.
sure, they have to give back the laptop, cell phone, and oddly enough the backpack too, but it's still a damn good deal, yo. and all you're doing is troubleshooting NICs, wall plates, and the cable itself. heh... i'd apply for the job, but they don't hire in the fall. grr. but i'm going to check stuff out around campus anyway.
but i think he said they have 25 working for them total... which includes the 2 heads of the whole sheban
Insert mind here.
Northwestern did this right from the beginning I think. Starting from the first year the dorms were networked, the university corralled a group of ResCons (short for Residential Networking Consultants) who received certain perks, including housing in their dorm and even room of choice. Then they hired a smaller group of Sr. ResCons (also students) to manage the volunteers. There was a week-long training session for the ResCons before school started. The program was very successful, and it actually became quite competitive. There were many more applicants for ResCons that positions available. Of course, some residences (i.e sororities) were typically hard to staff, but in general, a very successful approach.
This makes it easy for the U, but everyone has to use Windows. My uncle started going there. I go to NAU, where students are more free. They have a linux guide on their site, and someone assigned to field linux questions.
.png images and I don't know how to change it back. It looks just terrible, no zoom, and it's stretched, but not resampled.
I prefer linux, because it allows me to choose how I wan't my system, and my own built and expensive property is not in itself an advertising tool.
In windows which I'm using at home now, Quicktime is taking over all the
ahhh, it's so tough to support an old windows 95 machine, wwwwaaaaaaaaaa
..., I can't come over there and do this for you, ..., I get enough beer thanks"
/var/tmp/porn I can store megabytes of pictures, awesume"
..."
....
Pitiful young punk. try phone/lab support in a really heterogenus environment
Gone are the days of kermit over the campus digital phone system on every damn clone PC and OS.
"type,..., no you don't actually type type, COM, no it isn't short for commie, type com, no,...C O M, eh, yeah funny, I haven't heard that one yet, type com,
Gone are the days of shell accounts for every one.
"so if I mkdir
Gone are the days of the dreaded 8 am dead disk.
"YOu better get those files back or I don't graduate, then I am going to make your life hell for the next year."
Gone are the days of statistic packages on Vax clusters
"when you start the program the first thing you type is outfile."
"yeah but,
"you didn't type outfile, What is on the screen is all there is, therefore I can't help you."
Gone are the days of freely available system commands
"so if you type wall CalvinandHobbes.txt everyone sees this great asci art."
Gone are the days of the damn comp sci offcampus rat
"let me get this straight you have a wyse over a 300 baud modem to a modem pool that does 2400, connecting to the outbound modem pool in your department back out, at 1200 baud modem to NCSA and god knows what's on their end and you're complaining about the speed of your connection?"
Gone are the days Gopher Sites and Anonymous FTP.
"three clicks to the Holy Grail Script, and Caddyshack also?"
"info-mac huh, I'll take one of you and one of you and..."
Gone are the days of Ethernet Introduction to Dorms.
"you pug the data port power pack in to your ethernet card. your computer is now toast as is our switch in the closet."
Gone are the days that sweep a naive youngster along the Road of SAM (SysAdmin Madness tm)
How the hell did I end up feeling so old at 26? and now back to some whining about how tough it is to set up the current crop of idiot freshman.
The AOL Instant Messenger sounds echoing through the halls, competing for airtime with ICQ's "uhoh." MP3s blaring through speakers with four inch "subwoofers." Limewire icons in everyone's system tray. The idiot downstairs running a packet sniffer and harvesting usernames/passwords because the entire building's on the same Ethernet segment. (Thank $DEITY for ssh.) The idiot upstairs running an FTP server stocked with warez, porn, and MP3s.
I'll miss college so. (Hah!)
At the lovely University of Pennsylvania, it's a total breeze. We have so many freshman that want to get an on campus job that they don't realize how badly they're being ripped off. So they sign up to be "Information Technology Advisors" and there are about 15 per dorm. One sits with a laptop at the front desk and people ask him for help. The other 14 sit in the computer lab on our bulletin board waiting for jobs to show up. We do a couple thousand cases in a week.
They show up a week early for school for "training" where someone shows them how to download ethernet drivers onto a floppy from a website. And click on windows control panels to enable DHCP. Anything more complicated gets refered up to more experienced (And more paid) personel.
I assume this is the way most schools do things. It's kindof cut and dried, cheap, and effective.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Is it me, or does my university have the dumbest cap ever created (500MB internet limit a week). Unlimited Unviersity traffic. Of course, I have not tried it yet, so don't know if they really care, but that's really tight!
We are actually taking our email server off line to strip out all SirCam infected emails this week. I think we had something like 6% of our active accounts containing SirCam emails.
We've also shut down something like 10 IPs/MAC addresses for Code Red.
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Sounds about right for collegiate hiring decisions. I interviewed once with the internal IT staff of American U, never got a call back, but I realized that after 3 years, I'd be making 9.75 and have the honor of still working in a lab. This was after two summers of making 12 an hour. So, throughout my academic career, I did paid internships and part time gigs. Earned more, and saw more. Only thing I missed out is seeing a huge campus lan run, I worked in a lot of small offices in DC.
ostiguy
Here's a thought. Had you supported it, this problem might not have happened.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I work here at Rice University in IT. And I gotta say, most of the students, have not a clue about what's inside a computer. I mean,some of these are computer science and computer engineering people. Which is just plain sad. I would venture to say a majority of students nowadays don't have a clue as to how to set up a network card, let alone a wireless card(don't even get me started on ssid's!). This is even in the age of technology and kids who are 15 years old running their own startups. The same was true when I worked for LSU back a few years ago. The situation is dire my friends Dire I Say!!
Declare martial law. Then, send a group of network administrators to some horrible place like New Jersey, and make sure they drink the water.
Sure, six out of ten will die, but when the survivors get back..
Sardaukar!
You'll then dispatch your home-grown Sardaukar against anyone who leaves a certain unpatched Microsoft product running.
Indeed, they'll also work nicely for those people who insist on spreading SirCam, or who never upload after downloading 3 GB of mp3s.
Your college could go the way of DeVry (where I'm going now in Columbus) and not even have dorms... my roomates and I set up our own network easily. Less of a cost to the university and less of a hassle for the techies at the school.
Yellow bird I see
The gray dragon wisely hides
Honor is duty
I'll include some great war stories from the dorm trenches at my particular university:
The Residential Technology department (ResTek) has a program called TekHelps... 8-12 volunteers for each hall process work tickets for students needing to hook up ethernet for the first 2 weeks of school. We moved in 2 days early for training. Their policy was "TekHelps can touch the computer", which meant the user had to sit their and possibly learn how to operate the computer Daddy had bought for them. Cons: no pay, too much work. Pros: experience for resume, early move-in, many ignorant dorm honies. (Many of the girls I helped continued contacting me throughout the school year for my geek prowess.)
As far as ResTek themselves, they wouldn't hire me into a paid position (despite my previous experience as a lab consultant at a previous university). I later discovered they had a policy of avoiding people with experience, and preferred people-skills. They figured they can train them later and be friendly for now. This is what happens when non-techie managers are in charge.
This ignorance extends to their ethernet network. All the residence halls are either 10 mbit or 100 mbit depending. Internal LAN thoroughput is dandy... I was pulling, umm, academic documents off people's FTP servers at 1-2 mbits. Once you left the LAN and went out through the ResTek Qwest Internet link, it all went to hell. ResTek is fond of the term "T1", but they really just have a fractional DS3 connection, and they buy chunks 1.54 mbits at a time.
Picture 2700 students trying to cram data through 4 mbits of pipe. Yeah. That was the beginning of the year, and after many frustrating e-mails and calls to ResTek they added another "T1", or just upped the cap on the Qwest link. Ping times were still 1200+ 24/7 (no gaming for you!), and thoroughput was usually less than a 28.8 modem. More angry calls until the end of winter quarter.
End of winter quarter, and the pipe is cranked to 7 mbits. Ping times go down to 600-800, with decent pings late late at night. There's a twist at this point, though. ResTek was running an HTTP proxy server that leeched off the seperate academic link... 10 mbits of virgin pipe just asking to be sucked up by Napster transfers and porn. Up until that point the proxy had been sucking 3 mbits 24/7 off the academic pipe, and the academic technology dept (my employer, as a matter of fact) finally shut that little scheme down.
This coming year they added two more halls and the pipe is now 9 mbits. The number of people on the network will be close to 3600, and I feel the utmost pity for those poor souls. I will be living in a lake house sitting on a fat DSL connection cackling like a madman.
All in all it was a nightmare dealing with their ignorance and denial of the problem. They remained convinced that if they stopped the top 15 bandwidth users everything would be fine. That's the last time I try to explain to a manager how you can't cram almost 3000 people down 7 mbits. One of their staff members answered my complaint with "move off campus and get a cable modem", which I did at the end of the year. :)
Now that the story is done, here's some tips to reduce headaches:
That's my essay, hope it helps people reduce headaches for poor college kids... I don't want my suffering to be in vain. ;)
Adam "Fogie" Fogler -- Professional Paid College Student
I go to the school in the Southwest that has over . Movein is always fun, especially with getting the ethernet going ,etc. Most of the points brought up here are true - use DHCP and have a good information site available from Resident Advisors, etc.
I just remember back in the day - going to visit one of my friends at the all girls dorm just so that I could wire the entire hall and get a bunch of numbers. It worked out excellently, though its too bad the girls I met weren't the brightest.
I also have a friend at a nearby college that is on the school's IT install group. Its a much smaller school, so he has large chunks of time with nothing to do. His recommendation? Gameboy Advance. I can see the commercial now - Technical Service for the masses advanced.
unf.
For the last two semester I resided in a fairly wired dorm apartment. Eight computers for four people (two dualboot Windows/Linux, one dualboot Windows/BeOS, three Linux, one Mac OS and one Mac OS X (yea BSD)).
Originally we just plugged ourselves into the network. My roommate happened to be running a DHCP server on his one box to lease IPs to the other three machines of his. Apparently a bunch of other Windows boxes on our subnet defaulted to DHCP and the computer illiterate owners of those boxes just thought 'hey, it set itself up by itself and didn't think twice about it'. Around the second semester the other guys in my apartment and I decided to grab our own subnet (our University owns an entire B class and only uses about twenty three of the subnets) and firewall ourselves off from the rest of campus (tangent: when our University blocked Napster's server IPs this setup was very useful because we just set our router, a linux box, to dial out to a local ISP and route all packets destined to the servers out the modem). At this point, the DHCP server on his one box stopped leasing IPs to the subnet we were previously on. After a couple annoyed students came to ask us to fix their computers after they suddenly stopped connecting to the network we figured out what happened. After checking the DHCP server's logs it turns out he was leasing IPs to around thirty or forty other computers.
We've been lobbying our University to use a DHCP setup. It would really faciliate moving in for students and stop those annoying problems like students mistyping their IP addresses (or simply just putting in a random IP in their subnet) causing multiple computers to have the same IP address.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
of an M$ box ? this sounds like idiocy, someone got a kickback from M$ I bet..
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Bring an old matress aong with you to put beside your desk.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
The biggest help I think is to provide the needed information in the form of flyers and on the School Website before the week actually begins. People who know how to setup there own computers will look there before they get to school usually so they have the needed info to connect.
If someone calls for info and not asistance give them the info or make a prerecorded message that provides all the necessary information.
And you can do what one school did, in which any computer with a working dhcp client could connect and get access to the schools local website only. Once on it they were instructed to fill out an online request form which registered their mac address to dorm room number and student. Then all they had to do was reboot or restart the dchp client to get full access.
But the biggest thing is mostly to provide the information so anyone with experience can do it by themselves without having to call and jump through hoops to get what they need. I don't know how many times I had problems getting simple information from help desks because they insisted on knowing the OS and all they supported was Win95/98 and wouldn't touch NT/2000 at all when I wasn't asking that.
What could be the possible risks of using a very cheap one from another maker? What could they do to me?
There is little no info from the university IT services just a web site that contains a copy of the network user agreement that absolves the university anything and everything.
What are the limitations of a network user agreement and my legal rights? Is a network user agreement like a software user agreement? Can anyone remember a legal case involving a network user agreement.
The only tale I can tell was on the student end. The university I attended installed a dorm ethernet network and made the several thousand students share a limited number of connections (I think 500 or so). Given that the pr0n and warez leechers were on every single moment of the day, getting on the network was a test of patience to say the least. Being friends with the grad students responsible for helping support this monstrosity, I was one of many people who pointed out to them that the problem wasn't just the number of available connections or bandwidth (although those were problems), it was these losers abusing the usage policy.
:)
Imagine these users' collective surprise when they got emails that contained copies of their usage logs and a stern warning. None of them were real l33t d00dz, of course, and the getting on the busy network got much easier after that day.
My sigs always suck.
It's simply a matter of keeping your eye on the real priorities. Attractive females get the best service, get their systems tuned to the max. Everybody else can damn well figure it out for themselves.
I'm campus contact for College Ave campus of Rutgers U. We've had pretty massive host growth. User education is the KEY to reducing workload on your techs and admin. Three words will set you free:
LITERATURE LITERATURE LITERATURE. Make up pamphlets about the following subjects, distribute them to EVERY ROOM and email them to students and parents over the summer preceeding the semester on the following subjects:
-How to get and install a network card
-How to register for an IP address online
-How to set up IP in various OS's (Win9x, win2k, Mac OS 7, Mac OS X, command line linux)
-What rules you'll have to abide by concerning bandwidth caps, providing access and illegal activities
After you get everyone online youll have users screaming about configuring stupid crap like outlook and AOL. Create online documentation about these and make people aware of them.
Mind you Rutgers doesn't use DHCP, so that registering stuff might sound a little non-kosher to you small network DHCP guys :). We've tried, DHCP just isnt an option across ATM, more than two dozen routers and a few hundred VLANs.
For those wondering, Sisyphean:
Endlessly laborious or futile
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Some universities enlist the help of students to serve as the front line... the students live in the dorms that they are responsible for helping.
These students work for a nominal hourly fee (and a few tech perks like a cool email address of their choice and increased print/disk quota). This is the perfect setup because of the bursty nature of this kind of technical support, and also because of the simple nature of most of the problems. The students also like it because it serves as a nice resume builder for young CS students.
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
but that sounds like every workday for me, though you have 30 more technicians(?) to assist. Our little network group consists of 4 router techs, 5 wireheads, and 9 logical networking staff to deal with SNA, TCP, DLC, ATM, for nearly 4000 clueless employees. The best advice I can offer is DHCP all the way. More headache on the infrastructure team but easier to support and configure :) GOOD LUCK and MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
We face the same problem with more students and less workers on the problem. i advise a hasty retreat
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
To be brutally honest, most of the resnet people are monkeys; fortunatly nowadays you don't need much more than that to get a plug and play ethernet card working on a modern computer with DHCP.
One of my friends, who works for resnet, is going to do his best to convince all the girls he plugs in to let him run a distributed.net client on their computer- under his name, of course. Hell, they don't need a gHz to run Word and Winamp anyway...
But yeah, as a previous poster pointed out, it's a good way to meet girls- Last year I got several girls (and the occasional guy) up and running with an Ethernet card, on a friendly basis, and eventually got to know half of them pretty well.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I work for residential student computing at uiuc.edu. We go through the same thing every fall, except with more students moving in (I think) and less Novell.
.mpg files so that people can watch it in their rooms if the looping cable thing doesn't work, or they bring their computer after we give the channel to other programs.
This summer, in particular, we've started some new programs to help students get their ethernet connection working on their own.
Last year, we put booklets in every room describing how to cable for a single computer or multiple machines with a hub [1]. It also covers driver installation for MacOS, Win9x/ME, and Win2k, as well as physical installation of the card.
That worked pretty well, so it's happening again. In addition, we've shot a video covering many of the same topics that'll be looped on a dorm-only cable channel for the first few days (making dvd's is fun!). It's also available on cd, in
But there's still no substitute for competent people. We keep people in the computer labs for most of the day every day between move-in and the start of classes. They loan out hubs and sell cables, and also (hopefully) diagnose problems and tell people how to fix them without needing to go up to the room. If that doesn't work, they either take one of our people up to their room to take a look (if that wouldn't abandon the lab) or fill out a form on our website, so somone can call them and check out the problem whenever they're free.
It's always fun -- lots of hours for everyone.
[1] the uiuc dorms were wired before there was an ethernet standard, so the network jacks use the 4 middle pins. we have custom cables in every room that inevitably get plugged in backwards and thus don't work.
Way to use that word of the day. (no points for subtlety, though.)
I went to school at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, one of the earlier schools to have a mandate that all students should be "wired" (as they called it). When I arrived as a freshman in 1995, all non-Greek on-campus housing was wired with 10baseT LAN access and all libraries and academic buildings (save for the Architecture building, funny enough) had access to the same network. Remember, this is the first year that Windows 95 came out. Through the network, not only did you have access to the Internet, but you also had a complete suite of software available without any installation hassles, including Maple, Word, Excel, and various other programs required for all your classes. By my sophomore year, when I started working for the IT guys as a part-time student installer, every on-campus student could bring in their machine and plug it in. I spent a good deal of time running around to various buildings, installing ethernet cards and making sure people could print, login, stuff like that.
The number one most important thing for a large-scale mass install like this is excellent documentation. I'm not talking user manuals, but step-by-step, written for special-ed third grader instructions. The docs for this project were excellent. I may have helped out maybe 50 people tops in those first couple of move-in weeks. I think the figures I remember were something like 70% of people needed no help beyond the instructions. That's pretty good when you're dealing with 5000 students, 3500 of which had older computers that were setup on the network the previous year (those are more difficult because they still have all their settings in place for older configurations).
The second most important tip is to have well-written support software. The software that Lehigh had doing the dirty work of configuring network settings, initializing programs for network use, and setting up printers and connections was pretty solid. Everyone once and while you'd get some oddball Packard Bell that didn't like it, but for the most part, it was solid. Macs were even supported well (indeed first, because the school actually transitioned from all Macs to all PCs during this period). People running Linux were usually clued in on their own, so no help needed there. In contrast, other friends have reported stories to me of utter nightmare installs due to programs crashing, wiping out configuration settings, installing the wrong software, etc. at other universities. If you don't have solid software that you yourself are comfortable using, don't push it out onto thousands of incoming freshmen. Every tiny annoyance you see will become a full-blown logistical nightmare as you try and coordinate your support staff to fix it.
Finally, use e-mail effectively. Our student consultants were all setup with mailing lists that we could post problems and solutions (mostly solutions) for even the rarest of situations. We were all told to do this and told to watch for the information as well. Information flows a lot better when a bunch of geeks can read threads of problems and solutions than when you go over it during organizational meetings. For us, those usually were reserved for congratulatory pizza and the occasional mass wishlist.
Of course, all that is probably a little dated (we didn't have wireless LANs yet when I left), but as far as logistics goes, it's pretty much the same good advice.
Documentation. Solid software. Communication. If you've got that, you should be fine.
How about this:
1) Make sure that the connections in each dorm room actually work with a properly set-up computer BEFORE the students move in. Check each one with a laptop if possible.
2) Provide clear instructions for connecting to the network under various operating systems, types of hardware, etc.
3) DO NOT make yourself responsible for setting up everyone's individual PC. Provide them with access and instructions, but the students should be responsible for all hardware and software configuration (except maybe if it's a "mandatory laptop" or some other school-bought PC...). You can't be expected to configure thousands of PCs that have just arrived.
4) If problems appear during the "rush", first check the connection with a laptop. If it works, you shouldn't be obliged to fix it right away. Make sure all networking problems are fixed first. PC troubleshooting can be available from nerdy students, a hired pool of trained techs, etc.
Or do you think this is a bit harsh?
-Vic
Having done this as a student worker twice at Clarkson University, I know the best thing you can do is plan, do training and then on the actual days communicate well and work really hard (drink lots of caffine). Really though, the training and the communication are important. Have a central command post everyone can call, or radios. Triag things, skip the hard stuff and come back, get the easy ones on as fast as possible. Most of the ones that seem tough at first end up needing windows reinstalled or something evil like that. get them later!
A lot of people have already written in with some good advice as far as FAQ's and the such. At the Univ. of Mich I think they do a very good job of handling this sorta thing with about 40,000 students. They have a whole entire division called ITD which may offer some material you may wish to cover.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
I worked for the networking department at a reasonably large university until last year, and we went through some quit easy, and very difficult years. The key, esspecially when everyone is moving in is to have well trained people, who have not only the technical knowlege, but are also good with people, as there are a few challenges there (esspecially with parents who think their child is the _most_ important thing you could be doing). I'd say you've got enough people at least, even if you don't have any to spare really. We put just under 900 people IIRC online at the begining of last fall, without _too_ many problems with about 20 people, both staff and work-study students. Though it did take us about a month to deal with all the trouble calls.
The key is also to do as much in preparation as absolutly possible. Have all your documentation written, web pages done, forms and paperwork done, and printed, space reserved, staff trained, etc. But the two most important things, in my opinion, are to have all jacks that can be wired, wired. Even if they aren't all active, as long as they can be turned on remotely. We spent a great deal of time and effort (which could have been better spent) hooking up jacks on weekends people are moving in. Also make sure all the jacks have been tested within a couple of weeks of students moving in. Janitors can knock things in closets, staff can (and frequently do) bang jacks when moving funature, etc. creating problems that can be tough to track down when people have moved their things into the rooms. The other thing to make sure you've absolutly done is to have a worknig office, with trouble call database (or some other good way to track calls, not little slips of paper), with people to anwser the phone, already schedualed. Waiting until students arive to hire work study students or waiting until then to schedual them, to anwser the phones is a big mistake. The office will end up mostly empty for the first week to two weeks, which is the most important time.
Also dhcp will help a great deal. But what ever you do, do not require a MAC address to lease an ip to them. If you require a form to be filled out, or the student to pay a feet, etc. before they get serivce, remotely activate their port when they do, it's much easier to allow the person anwsering the phones to have a web page, or some other application to turn jacks on or off, than to have them (or in our case have them, ask someone else to) enter a MAC address in the dhcp table.
Here at Kansas State University we use an online system to keep track of connection problems. The system has the ability to enter, edit, search, and close calls. It is written in jsp and uses mysql as the database. It was presented at the RESNET Symposium this summer. If any other university is interested in this just send an email to deltar@ksu.edu.
If you dont know what BOFH is, you will never know how to properly deal with users.
I admin for a private high school in Connecticut, and I get this problem every year. Kids already have a NIC, but it's not set up right. Or something else obscure doesn't work. Here are a few helpers to get you through the mad rush.
1. Hire help. Cheap help. Go to the local high schools, and offer $50 bucks and pizza for a day of installing NIC's. Get tech-savvy students(duh).
2. Insist that your job is *only* setting them up on the network. If it doesn't work on the first plug, move on and come back to that person later.
3. Use only one type of NIC. I use 3Com 3C-905B cards. Carry a driver diskette with you.
4. Never help anyone with a Compaq Presario. They are a nightmare. Corollary: If you get suckered into helping anyone with a Presario, never, ever, call Compaq Tech Support asking for a recovery disk.
5. Set up a help desk site with common problems and solutions. Easy with PHP or something.
6. If students are savvy enough to do their own stuff, by all means, let them. This means anyone running Linux, so just give them the NIC, and tell them to have fun.
7. Block outgoing P2P. It will save you lots of bandwidth.
8. Use 10-Mbit hubs or switches in your dorms. This will keep the rest of your network (100Mbit?) nice and tidy from P2P traffic.
9. Keep a close eye on possible haxors. You know how to identify them, the kids who bring their own Cisco routers to school. They're the ones who are going to bring down your gateways.
10. Breathe. Just take it easy, and remember, they're only computers.
Hope this helps.
Ted (Ted.Dziuba@LEGIT_MAIL_PLZ.cheshireacademy.org)
"Quoth the Penguin, pipe grep more"
Even though our scale is (much) smaller, I'm sure we face the same types of problems. So, I do have some advice:
In my experience, the first point is the most important one. The more stable your infrastructure is, the less problems you'll have. Use reliable network cards, switches, and cabling. Unless you're professionally trained, contract out your cabling, or at the very least, get it professionally certified. You do not want to spend 2 days troubleshooting a network problem a single student is having only to find out it's because their wire is running beside a BX cable in the wall somewhere.
Cheers,
Jason.
I work in an it fuction @ Algonquin College in Ottawa Canada.
:)
we have a residence with cisco ip phones, aprox 1100 students with madatory laptops (IBM Thinkpads runing win98, nt 4, 2k and linux)
mixed in with a substantial wireless 802.11 network, Mac, Sun, Sgi, os390.... all working together across 7 campuses 50 miles apart. if you think you have headachs..
btw help desk responce will be 65% of calls resolved 1st day, and 10 min service to labs/classrooms.
classes start aug 27..
are you ready?
Why weren't there any question marks in that whole paragraph? Just a thought ;)
No sig for you.
I am responsible for all the support for my college along with one other person and our superviser (who really doesnt do that much trouble shooting). Between the two of us in the first two weeks of school we handle connecting about 800 students and troubleshooting probably 1/4th of that along with going to class full time. I can honestly say I have seen some oddball configurations, no I dont mean the ever present RJ11 phone cord in the NIC why doesnt my internet work problems either. I think the worst I have seen has got to be a user who installed her own network card with the help of her mother. I got there and the NIC was showing no link light, her port had been managed up and I checked all the cables. It was only after a few minutes of scratching my head that I decided to open the case (something we are ordianrly not aloud to do because the school is afraid we owuld break something) only to find that the PCI nic was just hanging there in the open, screwed in to the backplane of the case... not connected to any slot. So ofcourse I had to nicely explain to her that the card needed to be placed in to one of the slots in order for it to work. to which she replied "Oh thats why it was so hard to install, we just couldnt figure out how to balance it right to screw it in." Fortunatly this was one of my first experiances and I learned that no matter how strange or funny the problem is its best not to laugh and just keep cool and explain the problem calmly and you will be supprised how many people are truely gratefull to have someone come in and fix their computer with out looking down on them.
For dorms it's all about micro managing. .edu I go to (name with held because they don't deserve more students it's in cali, in a big famous city and has a baseball team,and foortball team that used to have Joe Mantana).
The
Just got the novel idea of micromanaging
first getting DHCP up and running
then
I know that the news roll around, and girls seem to find out about you faster than prospective male friends. It gets to a point where they give you X program and say "here, fix it" and you go "Hmmm, let me have a look... I've never seen this software before" and they go like "well, < girl smile> you're better prepared to fix it than I am! < /smile>." Sad. I spent a lot of overtime at my helpdesk job, maybe an inertial thing to do in a college that's mostly females.
:`(. You won't believe how much you can chill with girls without getting the slightest hint of interest, other than one seemingly deep look once in a lifetime. Geez, maybe I just imagined that look?
Sometimes it seems you get to be nothing more than the "safe" guy for the girls that you're around. They tell you anything when you're as much of a worry as a gay person could be to them
As just the "guy who can fix my computer" I even knew a certain Epson 740i mac driver that kept me going back to this girl's room. Torture to be just there when you're too introverted to make that first move :)
It does make for some good friendships if you tag along with them to the mall, movies, college events... Well, I'm very quiet and sometimes I'm almost not even there. How about you guys? ~Fractaltiger
"Wireless : LAN
At the university where I did this kind of job, they had purchased a dozen pocketPC's or so (the b&w ones) specifically for this. When one of us at the helpdesk had to go help some clueless student out, we could check if we could get an IP via the little pocketPC and if the problem was maybe related to something other than the students PC (ie the cablemodem, the UTPcable itself (u would not believe how many times i came across selfmade but defect cable....), or even a problem at the DHCPserver).
At the University of Oregon. In a week and a half, we connected a few thousand students, with any configuration they had, to our network. For several years in a row, at no cost to the student (minus the ethernet card we sold them at-cost.)
We worked out a system:
Hire about 30-35 first tier techs, and train them. Divide into teams of about 8 per complex (we had 5 complexes) with 6 first tier techs, 1 second and 1 third tier tech. (The third tier is also the crew boss. My^H^H His word is God.)
Have everyone work 12 hour days.
After the first week and a half, let the first tier techs go to class and have the second and third tier techs work as many hours as possible for the next month fixing the problem computers.
Works like a charm. Don't forget to saw off half that card to get it to fit in the old, black Compaqs!
That was a fugly princess too! :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
This is absolutely not true.
First, the insinuation that working at a university is somehow "easier" (he'll beg off that he didn't mean that) is false. Most universities (especially mine) are charged to do more with less. Budgets are finite and accountable. Taxpayers raise as much hell as shareholders and have the unsavory habit of reminding civil cervants of that ability all too often.
Second, one mad rush? This time of the year (it actually happens twice - again in January) is a mad rush in addition to supporting thousands of staff and faculty members who are, in some ways, much more demanding than students.
Third, the restrictions are not arbitrary. When you have a DS-3 (not fractional) dedicated to the dorms and it is pegged 99% full and preventing kids from doing what they are supposed to be doing (academic work), then the rubber hits the road and hard decisions have to be made. There is no arbitrariness involved; only decisions made to keep the lights on.
Many people in industry look down their noses at academic networking, but when they come in and see the scale of the problem as well as its intricacies, they usually scurry back to a nice cubicle at Amalgamated Widgets.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
No. My university only supports Windows and Macintosh on student machines. Our policy is that Linux is for people who know what they're doing. We won't do any setup- the basic network info can be deduced from Windows/Mac instructions.
On the other hand, we don't discourage Linux use. I've run Linux, Solaris, and now Irix from my dorm room, even though I only do Macintosh support (I've avoided Windows, thank god). You'll get nasty messages if you're insecure or sucking bandwidth, but there's no policy against Unix or even running (secured) servers. People just know not to call us for help because they can't get printing working under RedHat. It's not that hard.
And students usually pay for network access. The only fair rules are "don't make life difficult for other users or net admins". This means no bandwidth hogging, no warez/mp3z servers, no packet sniffing Linux boxes or trojaned Windows machines. As long as students play nice and don't fuck up the network, admins should not care what they run on it.
And in fact, we have proportionally far more network abuse (intentional or not) from Windows users than from anyone else. The few of us here who use Linux usually know what we're doing.
I assisted with the @home roll out at UK, it really pissed me off that the Insight technicians that did our job off campus got paid double what we did, but it was a good experience, especially the girl with the ancient Packard bell that I had to saw through the case to add a nic (One of our other techs had stripped every one of the case screws).
Read my plan to save the Bengals
I've worked for the past several years of college for the ResNet at my school. We too are in the process of getting prepared for the coming hordes but still have a few more weeks to go thankfully. The big thing I've been working on recently is putting together our manual. In it we have customer service guidelines, troubleshooting checklists, terminology definitions, job description (with specific duties clearly stated), and lots of other misc. things that all my co-workers should know. One thing I would like to state clearly to anyone involved in getting large amounts of people online in a short amount of time: DHCP IS THE SHIT. There is no other way to put it, DHCP kicks all ass. Before we had DHCP here we had to visit every single person who wanted online and issue them an IP, now anyone with low-level networking skills can get themself online (most the time you plug it in and it JUST WORKS). It makes the job 1000x easier. So if you work somewhere that doesn't have DHCP, you should bitch and moan and raise hell until you get it, it is really good stuff. That said, the way things go around here in the beginning of the year: We hand out information sheets to anyone who will take one, on these sheets are simple instructions on how to get online and some basic information about available network resources. Anyone who can't do it themselves calls our voicemail and says what they need. We then come out to their place and do it for them (or call and talk them thru it). If they need an ethernet card we can sell them one and install it, or they can get one on their own and we'll install it for them if they need us to. After a few weeks and demand for network hookups has died down some we have expanded services. Pretty much any computer problem we'll come out and see what we can do about it. OS reinstalls, software installs, hardware installs, help setting up email clients, etc. etc. etc. You name it we'll at least take a look at it, unless we're busy getting people online. The job is pretty easy for the most part. For awhile I was really bored and got into this thing where I would see how fast I could install a NIC. If nothing went wrong I could do it in about a minute or two, depending on case design and CPU speed. You run into lots of weird computer things, strange hardware, really bizzare problems. The worst part is dealing with the residents. It is interesting to see so many different people's dorms and stuff (you'd probably be amazed at some of the weird shit I've seen), but a lot of them don't really care about anything except the computer working how they want it too. You explain what you are doing hoping they will learn and not need your help again, they don't pay attention. Some of them are really rude and unfriendly for no reason. You try to be friendly and helpful and they treat you like total shit, and since it's your job you have to stay friendly and helpful. On the other hand, there are really nice people. I've been offered alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, food, money, dates, and numerous other things on the job. As another poster said, it is a great way to meet girls. It feels great to fix someones computer and have them get really happy and be just so incredibly thankful. Knowing that there are times where I just totally make someones day is the reason I stick with this job. That and the fact that I can educate people about computers.
After reading all the comments about meeting girls by fixing their computers, I realize that I have missed out on my college dorm experience. I should've never set up any of my computers in the dorms and called the help desk. I might have actually saved some time hunting down guys that didn't suck.
Make a list of some minimum requirements. My brother used to install cable modems (which require a NIC in the PC), and now and then he came across W95 machines with 16 megs of RAM, 20 megs of free hard drive space, and full of all imagineable add-on cards.
In the pamphlet or something point out that computers should have at least
- 32 megs of RAM
- 100 megs of free hard drive
- cd drive
Also, the computer should be operational before you start with the NIC, else they'll first ask you to fix all other kinds of things.
Fruit flies like a banana, what do the other flies like?
Plus it still has weaknesses: you cannot detect if somebody put a private subnet on a second NIC, and masqued a bunch of machines behind it.
MAC address' can be spoofed if absolutely necessary. And Napster requests can be sent on a variety of ports.
Besides, what the hell kind of admin is mainly concerned with preventing people from using the network.
That's right...charge them like 2 bucks a month, then collect the fee personally and don't tell anyone. You'll be set for life. Oh, and when they call for tech support, be like Compaq and charge them for the call.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I completely understand. I've a network port that some monkey broke six months ago that still wont work. .qz3
I have a relevant question:
I'm currently staying in a University residence and we have a similar network. People share files (videos, movies, mp3's ect.) and some people don't Some people are nice and copy the files across to their machine before playing them, others aren't so smart. We generally use a program called Netwatcher Pro to see who's doing what on their computer, but it sucks. You can tell it to kick people off who are on your 'kick list', but if you set it to do that it kicks everyone, not just the evil ones.
So short of packet sniffing (frowned upon) does anyone have any ideas about what we can use? Please help us...
Sham on
a rutgers student posting at +2. very impressive.
- another scarlet knight
P.S. Keith Sproul can take his 240mb/day limit and shove it up his ass.
he was logging in using stolen usernames?
I am surprised that more of you out there aren't using some sort of thin client solution! For me, it's the perfect way to control apps, bandwidth, and security.
At our K-12 all-girls school, we are running Citrix with StarOffice, IE, a few chats and games. Registry changes are locked down. No one installs anything anymore.
This was necessary since we have 100 dormers and 1 admin (me). Keeping things under control is a full time job but is made FAR easier with this solution.
We control bandwidth (and filtering) through the use of Windows 2000 ISA and Surfcontrol. Although ISA claims that it will control bandwidth, it doesn't do it at an individual level. You must create bandwidth 'pools'. This will be our first year with ISA, as we used M$ Proxy last year.
We had some issues with file/disk compatibility with foreign students' computers. Also, differing versions of Office and other apps really made things a bit confusing. Citrix solved all of that for us by letting us standardize our office and app software.
In addition, *YES* those dongles WILL NOT take the kind of abuse that a 14 year old girl will give them. Either use a molded all-in-one PC Card, or go with a simple USB Ethernet solution.
I always keep a few spare USB's on hand...
Chuck Hunnefield, chuckh@hotmail.com
Technology Coordinator
Linden Hall School for Girls
For the uninitiated...I'm referring to the Bastard Operator From Hell Stories found here.
A great read especially if you have ever gotten frustrated with a user or users.
Always value the individual over the system. --Bruce Lee "I don't need a Sig - I have a custom 191" - me
Seems like someone was reading the word of the day from Merriam Webster Online.
I know the feeling. I worked for the "Resnet" on my college campus for 3 years. Here's a couple ideas we did to calm the storm and major headaches.
1. As stated before... hand out pamplets with instructions. They should only call for help as a last resort.
2. We had webforms to register your machine and recieve an IP. Our campus ran on a generic DHCP where IP's were handed to specific MAC address'. And each student could only have 2 IP's. This was all done on the web.
3. We made minimum requirements for machines we would support. Must be faster than P133's.
4. We would only officially support Win95 and higher. If you were using linux or any other, you were on your own and should know how to do it yourself. But there were a few of us that were linux savvy and willing to help.
There were quite a few other things we did that helped out. Installathons at individual dorms at certain times.
I know the exhaustion of having to deal with these problems. We were a team of 10-12 people that covered our entire campus.
Good luck... and boy and I glad I graduated and don't do that anymore.
Brazil: Something fixed shoddily. Something Fixed in an over complex manner. Unecessary Ductwork in multiple colors. CMU Networking is Brazil
and girl's daddy Guru too... plus big brother ... better run fast or we all come after you and beat you up...
Here at Appalachian State University we only have 12 people working at the helpdesk to get around 5k people online. Let me tell you the past week has been hell for all of us. What we do is put signup sheets in all of the dorms, and then send the workers out to the dorms in rotating schedules. This way we do not have to waste our time manning the phones.
:(.
One thing I have noticed over the past 3 years working as a helpdesk tech is that very few know their school username/password because they use off-campus email, most of our setups are people who have forgoten this information.
At the moment, after working night and day for a solid week now we have about 1k people to go, which is pretty good considering we are only eleven dudes. It is still pretty backed up and will continue to be until sometime the middle of september... my question to you guys is, what the hell do you do with irate parents calling? Those idiots call yelling about how their pookey-poo has no internet and can't function with out her internet and to fix it now or they will call the chancelor or some crap like that. Personally I tell them that we are trying our best and that their kid will get fixed as soon as possible but have no special treatment and if they continue to be irate I pretty much tell them that oops, because of your stupidity your kid has now gone to the end of the list, MUHAHAHA to do this I just put a 'save to the end' tag in our database. My boss however usually bends over backward for the parents.
I am glad other people have to deal with this shit besides me! I believe if I have to go through much more of this I will go postal.
-AC from Appalachian State University
Well, it's nice to see that there are other people from UT with a brain, but as you will see soon enough, most people won't.
One of the big problems with UT going wireless is the fact that they partnered up with Lucent (that's not the problem), and the set-up that they currently have installed. What I can't believe is that the whole wireless system at UT is supposed to be 802.11b compliant, but for some odd reason, you can only use Lucent's (Orinoco) PC cards. This just pisses me off up the wazoo cause you can't even have another vendor (ie: Cisco) in your laptop because it won't work with the system that they have, even though it's supposed to be 802.11b compliant -- defeats one of the purposes of wireless.
Now I understand that "they are working on it", but sheesh. I wanted to use my Handspring Visor Deluxe paired with a Xircom 802.11b compliant card, but forget that.
Free the mallocs.
I recently graduated from Denison University (a small private school in the Midwest with about 2200 students) where each year we have something similar to your Dorm Storm. My boss came up with a pretty good model you may want to try. First, he actively recruited between 4-6 hardcore geeks. We all either had previous technical support experience, or insane amounts of personal knowledge. Second, he put us through about a semester of training where each week we had an hour long seminar on various topics: Network Topology, Trouble Shooting, Customer Management, everything you can imagine. Third, we took the students working our Student Help Desk and Computer and gave them all the training they would need to effectively help us out. Fourth, they arranged our "Network Blitzes" so that we covered either a single big dorm, or a quad with many smaller dorms all at one time. Slathered the campus with times and info, and we went door to door. The final result is a three layered support system: 1) Above average users that can put in manual IP's, DNS servers, etc. 2) Serious support for those people with Driver conflicts, diagnose bad ports, etc. 3) Emergencies - Those machines that require a great deal of experience. This way your real techs are free to handle the important problems, the students feel comfortable getting help from other students, you're there to keep an eye on them, and you can handle a good 90% of your support calls for the year at one shot. Good Luck, its rough, but you can have fun. Just trust me, try not to schedule one for a Friday night in a party dorm...
Make the students pay for some provider on the outside. If you don't want to handle the responsibility, then don't.
If the network connection is so important, *Cut the dorm network from the internet*. Make it a nice big CLOSED network. I bet a lot of people would lose interest after that.
While working IT at a UC school, we had the same situation. My co-worker then (and now partner for a company) wrote RNM: ResNet Monitor--Essentially a set of scripts to work with Ted Newman's DHCP server on a Linux/Unix system. The project is very robust, expandable for your organization, and GPL'd.
check out: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rnm/
Our company, Anylevel, Inc, uses this for contract work in doing the same thing. Check out www.anylevel.com (down now - changing DNS's - will be up in a day or two)-- there's more info there when the site comes up.
pzugnoni@pellam.ucr.edu
and they think I know what I'm doing....
We used an approach that combines some of the suggestions I've seen posted:
1. Give students very clear information for configurfing thier own machines on their own. Make the info clear and concise - don't give them so much information that they get confused. Use a type of "quick setup guide" and keep more detailed information available online (accessable through the computer labs for printing and bringing back to the dorm room).
2. Schedules "rollouts" over the first 4 weeks of school - only provide installation support to students who live in a dorm that is being rolled out that week. This will help you focus on solving problems in a pariticular area (dorm, geographic region, etc.). This also helps weed out issues related to specific locations (such as a flakey switch, bad wiring, etc.)
3. Use students who KNOW what they are doing. We had a student dorm networking rep in every dorm. It worked VERY well.
Good luck!
In true uber-geek, "I know how computers work therefore I'm better than you" fashion, tell them that if they can't figure out how to set up their machines themselves, they don't deserve to have them.
Seriously, though, what my school did (don't know if it still does) is provide instructions for all the usual platforms (e.g., Windows/MAC; if you're running *nix or BSD then you probably don't need help), and beyond that, require people to make *appointments* to have a tech come to their dorm room. At least that way things are a little more organized. Plus, since we're talking about college students here, half of them are too lazy to actually make an appointment, and will just find the geek down the hall to give them a hand.
Tastes like burning! - Ralph Wiggum
-foxxz
Troll-monster. I've got fanaies too.
Devon Ryan
Posting AC because I'm too lazy to login
home.uchicago.edu/~dpryan
...kids who have "accidently" set up their computers with DHCP (windows and linux alike)....Many people do this at home when they are sharing a Cable or DSL connection, but when they plug it into the dorm's network, a machine doing a dhcp request will take the reply from the closest computer...and get those 10.0.2.x IP's!!! Just something we ran into a lot last year, so FYI :)
Seems simple enough..... Plus you get the bonus of USB 'throttling back' net usage....
DONT GO TO SOUTHERN UNIVERSITIES!!!!!
Southern universities, like in Atlanta and Oklahoma are fucked up. They arrest people for having ftp servers (with only mp3's on them, not even porn!) and installing screensavers.
Fuck those ignorant hicks. Don't give those ungrateful bastards the benefit of your abilities. If you don't believe me, ask John Galt.
These fucking administrators, with no skills or abilities themselves, promote every cause that comes their way. They pride themselves on ignorance of the private sector and lack of speciality. These administrators in the South have repeatedly shown themselves to be the enemy of students and employees.
DO NOT GO THERE AT ALL!!!!!
Ha --funny and interesting Tshirt idea.
I imagined wearing it for a second.
You got a 0 for this advice!!? Someone should mod it up, man...
"Wireless : LAN