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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!"
"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?
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.
"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?
Nope man. Doesn't work. You forever get assigned to the realm of "the guy who can fix my computer".
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.