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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!"
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?
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.
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).
Only on Slashdot can that comment be "Insightful," as opposed to "Funny"
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
Be more concerned about the ones that bring someone else's Cisco routers with them.
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.
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
I'll remember that tradeoff thing when I tell my roommate we only get CSPAN on TV, but it never has any problems.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
...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.
'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...
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
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!
>> 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.
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
>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
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!
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"
All the students in my dorm were wired too, but I don't think it had anything to do with computers.
:-)
Oh, how I hated university.
sig fault
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.