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IPhones Flooding Wireless LAN At Duke
coondoggie sends us to a Network World story, as is his wont, about network problems at Duke University in Durham, N.C. that seem to be related to the iPhone. "The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke. The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the school's wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help-desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown. 'Because of the time of year for us, it's not a severe problem,' says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology. 'But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It's a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they're down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating.'" So far, the communication with Apple has been "one-way."
Zombie graduate students.
He mentioned scholarships, though it was in an offhand way. You're certainly free to disagree with what he's saying, but insulting him twice in six sentences while "refuting" him with a point he already made is absolutely wrong on any level.
Besides which, your own point is really no gem either. Your advice to get a scholarship is to be smart and hard working? It's half true, sure. Colleges do give scholarships to people with good grades--though often you also need extra-curricular activities to put you ahead even though that really has nothing to do with intelligence or hard work, merely interest in organized activities--but those are limited. If every student in the nation suddenly became smart and hard working, it would still help only an exceptionally small percentage of them receive a scholarship. In fact, since Duke is a good school you can be relatively sure that the vast majority of students who are accepted there are already smart and hard working, so even in your limited example
I happen to think the way the OP handled himself was flamebait, but the question he raised about free education is a debate worth having. Preferably without insults.
Congratulations to your daughter for getting in, getting money and getting through--but just because she did doesn't mean everybody else can, even those equally smart and hard working.
I have no idea why no one on the entirety of slashdot knows anything about networks. If I were to reply to every wrong post in this thread alone, I'd be here all fucking morning, so I'm just going to deal with this one.
DHCP is not implicit in any network topology. It may be modern and 'expected,' but, jesus christ, every time there's a network discussion on this site, DHCP is strewn all over it like shit on a truck stop toilet. Just because you were born in 1995 and have an "ADSL" connection that uses DHCP (well, it probably uses PPPoE now) doesn't mean you're qualified to say anything, and it certainly doesn't mean there aren't real networks that have never even heard of the silly little protocol.
That said, the initial DHCP request does go to a broadcast address, but it certainly has nothing to do with ARP. It goes to the global broadcast address (MAC: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF). There's no such thing as an ARP address. ARP is a network layer protocol lying atop Ethernet (primarily; it isn't limited to Ethernet, of course). It is a MAC address you are thinking of.
Your use of commas is worse than your knowledge of low-level network protocols, really. I don't even know why I bother. Whoever mods this shit up, go fuck yourself. And whoever's out there that actually does know what they're talking about (surely there's someone else out of two million users), like I do, fuck you for not replying and setting these morons straight. It's a ridiculous place to read for technological discussion, anymore.