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!"
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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
'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...
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.
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
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.
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.
A self-install guide was my first thought too, but with an important addition. Most installation instructions I see, even most instructions of any sort, show all signs of being written by somebody who knows the procedure and writes it down. This usually yields a set of instructions that does not work, because the person who writes down the procedure knows what the instructions mean and also believes some steps are obvious and not worth mentioning. They might not even be conscious of them. E.g., "Set XYZ to ABC mode," rather than "In the XYZ section, click the radio button next to ABC mode and then click Okay."
A better procedure is to write instructions, give them to a complete novice, sit them in front of a computer, then shut up and watch. Write down every confusion they have, then rewrite the instructions, and repeat until you have instructions that you know work for a novice.
>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"
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.
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.