Slashdot Mirror
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!"
"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?
Summary: mandatory laptops = kicking poor students in a vulnerable spot.
Freedom: "I won't!"
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.
What you do then is speak to them about everything but computers while you set theirs up. Then you look like somone who has another life who also just happens to know computers. Only tell them what's going on if they ask a question. The less specific they are the less specific you are. You'll still be "the guy who can fix my computer" but you may also be somone to associate with beyond computers.
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.
"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."
And you were also probably the least used network on campus. Maybe that's why you had so few network problems. And it's not that impressive a statistic, precisely because you serverely and arbitrarily limited the functionality of your network service to attain the (less important) standard of uptime.
I mean, listen to yourself! You required users to buy your NIC (at $50?!?), use only the operating systems that you allowed (I still haven't figured out what you're preventing by not allowing Linux as a client OS, aside from happy users), you misused the concept of DHCP, and you completely violated any standards of academic opennes and integrity. Your network sounds not like a success, but a disaster!
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! Your rules provide no benefit, other than to stroke your own sense of power.
If I were both a competent network user and a paying student at your university, I know I would've done my best to get you fired. Sheesh.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
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...
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
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.
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
Nope man. Doesn't work. You forever get assigned to the realm of "the guy who can fix my computer".
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.
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.