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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."
coondoggie sends us to a Network World story, as is his wont,
At least the editors admit that coondoggie is filling the queue up with network world stories. Maybe they'll do something about it at some point
-Bucky
He states now it's not a big problem, (guessing because it's summer and not as many students there). Then expecting it to be a BIG problem once students arrive. So to me this says that the iPhones using their service aren't students at all. If this is the case, buckle down the AP settings so they're not open or easily accessible via iPhone and require students to anti up their MAC addresses to connect to the wireless network.
But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical.
Wireless? Critical? Dumb.
I don't respond to AC's.
No wonder there is no answer... Apple people weren't able to receive any network package with all those iPhones around.
Rethinking email
that is a polite way of saying that Apple has not been responsive. Any other network having this problem?
"I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form," he says firmly"
How do they know that?
...it's their network. Why are we only hearing about it here? They probably have a loop in their network or some kind of ARP forwarding active they don't understand. You would think something like this would get caught early on in testing with the iPhone, this kind of problem tends to stand out. I also doubt the iPhone has enough horsepower to pump out 10Mbps of ARP requests, sounds like a networking device is sourcing these packets.
Sounds like they are having some issues with arp-whois being propagated across the subnets. Knowing Apple, each time these iPhones try to 'rendezvous' with all the Macs or iTuned PCs they refresh their ARP tables off the entire campus. Something is fucked up with their network machines if the arp boroadcasts are seen by the entire campus (hence the 30 access points going at once).
What they need is an AP isolation: the connected client should not (easily) see other subnets and should definitely not be able to spam ARP broadcasts across subnets.
Some BOFH admin really screwed up his net config.
I'm sorry, but there's something a little OFF here. No wireless hardware requests a MAC address. It may use MAC to authenticate to a table, but it goes for a DHCP lease.
Slashdot...sigh...
We have a number of WAP's at work. We also have a number of people who have bought iPhones, and we have not seen any wireless nodes go down from iPhone traffic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can take out a cisco WLAN controller with thin APs and aironet APs with an arp flood for a non-existent IP. Are they even in the same subnet? Is the whole wifi network from one building to another layer2? Or is the problem arising because it is actually layer3 from building to building and the APN name doesn't change.
Judging by the statement that they can exhibit the behavior after being handed from one access point to another kind of nullifies the theory that they may be trying to re associate with the users home network. They're trying to get back to the old AP, which arping wont do because it's on a different VLAN.
Mystery solved, now what can cisco do about it. I don't really care that it's an iPhone bug. I just think its one more DoS vector to patch up. Maybe de-associate the phone and drop traffic until it acts right? Set a threshold or something? You might still have a source of noise, hopefully it would realize it was dropped though. No link layer, no arp right?
Any non-secured network (either where users can plug into the lan or over wireless) where a device is able to bring down the network should be considered defective. I've seen places were the entire lan was flat with users connecting on cisco's management vlan and could bring down the whole company by plugging in a device that advertised a new route to the internet (legit or not). To a similar point, if a device on a wireless network is able to flood the network, then the access points need to be tuned. Sure, they can jam the airwaves, and there's nothing you can do to stop that DoS. But, you don't have to turn 18,000 requests per second into something that broadcasts across the rest of the network. Every firewall app that I've worked with includes throttling and I would hope these APs do as well.
This doesn't mean that apple released a product without a defect. But if your network crashes because of a defective device, then you should fix your network first.
free universal higher education
It would probably be prudent to fix the existing "lower" education systems we already have so that they are once again adequate training to hold a normal job. We should be fully trained in "general studies" by the end of our 6th or 7th year of school, and ready to take 4 or 5 years of specialized training for a field. The first 4 or 5 year specialist training course should be paid for by the government, any additional ones, well, ka-ching!
Umm, a bunch of ARP Requests by a few mobile devices shouldn't be knocking out a Cisco router. These AP's are supposed to be able to withstand much worse than a few of these things.
I call bullshit. I say it's their IT/Computing Department is blaming their poor infrastructure on iPhone.
I want to request a mac address from my access point. Anyone want to post a HOW-TO?
Disclaimer: Disregard the above post.
Not to mention that there are several hundred wireless access points on the Apple campus, and several hundred (possibly thousands) of iPhones on the same campus. You'd have thought that any inherent problem with the phone and networking would have been caught, isolated, patched, and distributed by now...
I'd lay odds there's something screwed with their network...
I would imagine that this problem is either A) a configuration problem on the school's end, or B) will be fixed fairly quickly. I suggest "fixed quickly" because if this is a problem, then all those iPhones Apple is giving to their own employees will crash the Apple campus wireless network too. Plus given all the amazing paid and free press Apple is getting on the iPhone I'm sure they don't want any significant problems arising to generate legitimate bad press about their shiny new product.
Mike Scanlon
There's no place like 127.0.0.1!!!
..
followed by
ET iPhone 127.0.0.1
= Grow a brain...
It's the university's, since their network people allow ARP broadcasts to cross subnets.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
While I agree that overall, Duke is worse than many top schools as far as being full of rich preppy kids (though they do have need-blind undergrad admissions now, but that doesn't mean they're truly fulfilling everyone's need), the article states there are 150 iPhones there. At a school of over 12,000 students plus well over 30,000 employees and faculty, I'm not sure you can say that 150 fancy phones (one for every 280 people on campus) are a sign of excess.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I'm a net engineer for one of the major US cable isps.. A VERY common issue I see with the Apple Airport Extremes is a problem with them declining offered leases infinitely. When this happens the DHCP server marks the lease as temporarily unavailable, the end result is a single offending Airport extreme can eat all the available addresses. The work around is to configure the dhcp server to ignore declines from the client. Regardless it's very annonying (and I'm typing this post on a Macbook so I'm not anti-Apple).
For all you saying "It's Duke's fault! Secure the network!" maybe you should consider that Duke provides wireless access to something like 15,000 undergrads, grads, faculty, etc. Duke's network is set up so that you can connect to a pool of internal IPs with no authentication, but before you can actually go to any sites other than the network registration site, you have to type in your Duke ID and password.
This is an effective solution. Can you imagine if Duke locked down APs with MAC filtering? You'd have 10,000 "authorize my MAC" requests between August 15 and 30 each year on an already-overwhelmed IT staff, and you can spoof MACs anyways. How many people actually know what a MAC is and how to find it? Sure, they could provide a tool that automatically detects your MAC, but how are you going to download it if you can't get on in th first place?
Also, please don't suggest WEP/WPA, because distributing a password/passkey amoung that number of users is as good as not having one at all. And a more complex solution, like PKI or smartcards, is going to create more headaches than it's worth when deployed to this number of users.
So, who cares? So he submits stories from Network World. He probably works for Network World. Does that fact alone make the story less valuable or interesting? If someone else had submitted the same story, it would be OK then? Slashdot has editors and a moderation system. There's nothing inherently deceptive in submitting your company's (or your own) stories.
Breakfast served all day!
Just junk food for thought...
At least 2 of his 20 published submissions were from non-networkworld sources. Of course his only posted comment is a 'correction' to a story linking which he's trying to point to....networkworld. Astro-tuffing should get some kind of modding too. And why are submitters not linked to directly, I had to cut/paste his name in just to see his profile.
Quack, quack.
.........but why should tuition be a barrier for anyone in a society as wealthy as ours?.......
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
All theory is gray
I must agree that 'free universal higher education' would be wonderful. The question is: where would it come from? Humans naturally complain about their situations and say that 'such and such' must happen. However, when they're called to sacrifice some amount of money - in the form of taxes - to accomplish such a fact, what then? They're stingy, reluctant, and complain even more. Furthermore, look at how many elderly people are disgruntled over paying taxes to the town/state for education when they don't even have children anymore. Look also at taxpayers who complain over paying for things that directly benefit the community and only indirectly benefit themselves. Yes, Duke is extremely fortunate to have a foundation with lots of money to do stuff with. I must admit that it's done very well as a money-making machine - raising rich alumni to add to Duke's coffers - but that's, well, business. In essence, for a 'utopian' society, something like communism or marxism would need to be in place. On the other hand, such practices stifle scientific advancement - and the inequalities drive us to achieve more to reach those levels. It all depends on how you look at it.
Site slashdotted out? Use SharePapyrus under Site Directory
They're not using the right terminology. It sounds like the iPhones are doing an ARP request for an IP address that isn't on the Duke network. Maybe it's trying to update its ARP tables?
Anyhow, the ARP standard is unclear enough that it's undefined what the response should be for an ARP request to an unknown destination should be (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/std/std37.html). Theoretically, every packet that you send needs an ARP entry, which means that every packet sent to something that isn't in your machine's ARP table would generate an ARP request. In reality, it seems that your router tends to substitute its own MAC address for non-local ARP entries (since all non-local packets go through the router, you really don't have to know what the real MAC address is)
It sounds like the Duke Cisco routers are misconfigured somehow, and are generating an ARP storm. Some Cisco routers has a bug where a packet sent to an IP address for which the router doesn't have an ARP entry causes the router to broadcast all subsequent packets across all of the router's ports. It happens in the cable industry when someone swaps out a GigE card and forgets to update the ARP tables on the Ciscos. Solution: use dynamic ARP tables, which can be a security hole.
FWIW.
spend thousands of dollars on expensive Cisco AP equipment, a factor above consumer grade systems, and something goes wrong, the extra instrumentation doesn't help and the vendor just blames somebody else? Is this a good reason not to go with expensive equipment, or just colossal incompetence of the administrator who configured everything?
Say what? The last time I saw something equally screwy it was a Cisco LightStream 1010 (ATM switch) running LANE (LAN Emulation) that played no part in layer 3 at all, yet it was still building up an ARP table of every IP datagram that flowed through it (and wondered why it kept running out of memory).
If you send out an ARP for an "unknown address", you'll get no response - it's not up to the router to respond on behalf of "non-local packets", it's up to the client to determine that the destination is non-local (by using the network and mask together) then picking a suitable gateway (usually default) for sending the packet on its way.
Therefore, the client already knows it needs to send the non-local/unknown-addressed packet through the router so it explicitly ARPs for the router's MAC address (if not already cached) - nothing to do with trying to get the MAC of the remote destination.
It sounds to me as if the problem is at least partly with the network admins who don't know their ARP from their MAC...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The Real WTF is - wireless at Starbucks isn't free, you have to pay through T-Mobile.
ARP is broadcast (not unicast nor multicast, unlike say, EIGRP which does use multicast); "floods" tend to be caused by broadcast (if from a single source - unicast if from multiple sources).
... where I work. Zhone changed something in the firmware that ships with their 4200IP DSLAMs that caused the Cisco equipment we put one behind to go down unless we're fast enough in changing a few choice settings first. We never found anything wrong with the Cisco equipment, and we were always able to fix the problem by reconfiguring the DSLAM to knock off the monkey business. The iPhone and a $3,000 DLSAM ought not to be flooding a network with ARP requests like that, but after seeing this I'm wondering if Cisco is completely faultless as Duke's people seem to think they are.
What you say is only partially correct. While there are opportunities for average incomes, the system vastly favors the wealthy. Just because a non-wealthy minority exists doesn't mean that its really fair. Paying for tuition isn't as bad as actually gaining admission. The fact is that that, while you can simply (not sure where you got that word) be smart and work hard, its much more likely that one who is given admission (assuming they're not a legacy) had the benefits that go along with money to compliment whatever effort they put forth. Its really only fair on paper.
Yeah, it's nice that there are full scholarships available for the 4.0 students, how about some for the 3.5s? You can't seriously tell me a 3.5 is so much worse than a 4.0 that it should shut all sorts of doors, and as you said, without a full scholarship there are lots of people who just can't afford places like Duke.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
>> First, it's entirely possible to go to a perfectly respectable in-state school for just a few grand a year.
Where have you been living? I have financed the education of two children who were good students and went to good state schools (U of Oklahoma, and University of Buffalo.) Both approach $15K per year with tuition, room, board, and books. That is more that "a few thousand."
Back in the dark ages before the flood when I went to Florida State (B.S. 1977) and UMass (Ph.D. 1982) I could attend a good state school for about $2.5K. I could earn about 1/3 to 1/2 of that in a summer. Today's students can't do that anymore. I would also point out that much financial aid these days is in the form of loans. It is easy for a student at a state university to finish an undergraduate education with $50K in debt. An education at a private U can leave a debt load at least 2X...
No. I don't care who pays too much for a phone.
Anybody who is smart and accomplished can go to to a good school, if not Duke in particular. You can always borrow the money. Many, many, if not all good schools now have need-blind admissions. Anyways, everyone knows it's really the middle class that get screwed over on aid anyways, not poor folks.
*Some* people with connections can get in even if they are not so smart, or really accomplished is the more accurate term, as grades count. You don't have to be rich, mind you, just related to somebody. These people, while deriving much less benefit from the education than the smart kids, also go on to pay for the whole deal for the next generation (along with the qualified students of course.)
Without wealthy donors, the whole system breaks down, and it's just a matter of how you create them. You can tax the unwilling, maintain a huge alumni base, and bet that students will stay closer to the school, thus more likely to donate. In case you don't get the hint, I'm talking about state schools. (Smaller) private schools need to ensure a larger proportion of wealthy alums, and allowing family connections to count makes that easier, not to mention the good will from the alumni.
BTW you just proved the point I made here. Thank you for that.
Okay if this is really the case, no DHCP network, then why does this same thing not happen when Laptops looking for DHCP addresses come in range of duke? For example, I would imagine that whenever there's a conference or perhaps when the student show up in september that all the laptops on campus are set to hunt for DHCP by default (since that's how one usually sets up wireless networks). Seems like you'd have the same sort of storm.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship...Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
.only those with wealthy families* *or the obedience necessary to create a squeaky clean scholarship worthy image can get in.
Did you not read what I wrote? I'll post it again:
. .
You're right; I wouldn't get much in the way of scholarships. I'm too willing to piss people off. Also, I'm sure there are selective schools that want people more capable than me. That's OK. I don't have a problem with selection based on genuine differences in intelligence or work ethic. This isn't about me though. Plenty of capable and only slightly deviant people don't go to good colleges, or don't go to college at all, because they can't afford it and just weren't straight-laced enough to get aid/scholarships. Even if some students get in on scholarship, why should ANY of the spots go those who are more economically privileged but less intellectually capable? Maybe your daughter is smart and hard working...maybe she isn't the bland conformist that I picture when I hear "scholarship material" (try to get funds if you've had an expulsion or done significant prison time!) If you really respect her, don't you want her to go to school with other people who are at or above her level? Why should some "fountain of ignorance" be able to buy his way in? Isn't it an insult to her to say that all her hard work and talent is only worth as much as being the son of an executive?
I know a Duke student who's extremely intelligent and hard working...but he also has a fairly well off family that supported him through prep school and now through University. Most successful people have a number of advantages in their favor. I understand that not everyone fits into the ugly demographics that we see when we think about social groups abstractly. I don't see have any of these nuances take away from my claim that education should be available to all, and access to an elite education should be based entirely upon mental ability, not on how well your parents managed to exploit the working class.
On a related note, few of the current determining factors for college acceptance should be considered at all. Admissions offices shouldn't look at race, family status as alumni, economic class, or even past academic performance. The last item may strike you as absurd, but think about it! Leadership and project development in hobbies and non-profit work, standardized test scores, work experience, and essays are far better ways of determining ability than grades. You get good grades in K-12 by doing what you're told. If you finish the work each day and turn it in, you get an passing grades whether you understand the concepts involved or not. (In K-12) If you attempt to spend your time learning through practical experience and self study, not matter how intellectually rigorous, you'll probably get expelled. Merely setting foot off the school grounds (without permission) can get you arrested for truancy! Compulsory school is a form on imprisonment or involuntary servitude. If colleges wanted to encourage insight instead of wrote parroting, they would ignore high school grades in their admissions decisions.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
12,000 students? Sure, if you count every grad student there is, regardless of how often they are on campus/using any wireless network. Duke has maybe 6,000 undergrads, and a much smaller student base than probably 75% of Division 1 schools across the country, and yet every other school seems to be doing fine with iPhones (such as the heaven 9 miles away at UNC)...
blarg, correction: so even in your limited example... the advice isn't particularly helpful.
Damnit...it's hard to win a debate in support of alternatives to the education system when you haven't slept for days and can't manage to write a few paragraphs without making so many grammatical mistakes and typos that everyone reading questions your education. I think I'll rest for a bit and resume this discussion later.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Oh, you already did. Never mind.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Spanning Tree Protocol is the root bridge of all evil.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Do you assume that "higher education" (past high school) is necessary for employment?
Further, do you assume that everyone is capable of making use of such "higher education"?
We seem to be pointed down this road in the US today and the truth is the answers to the two questions above are "no" and "oh my". So far, we're pretty far down the road of importing non-outsourceable low-skill jobs and moving everything else somewhere else so all the low-skill jobs don't exist for Americans. This isn't a long-term sustainable model because some people just aren't going to make it as "knowledge workers". Are these folks supposed to sit at home and collect welfare while illegal immigrants do the low-skill work?
Well, actually, maybe you can. Someone posted that Airpoerr Extremes have interesting DHCP problems. I would not be surprised if the DHCP client in the iPhone wasn't just impatient, or trying to hog a lease at the expense of any other competitor device. Not the first time Apple has been caught playing 'mine's bigger than yours' in networking code.
It wouldn't surprise me, either, that the iPhone might even try using the last IP it had. Never know, it might have just moved a few feet, and sheesh, that last AP has some hot packets, dude. Break me off another piece of that eh? Gone? Ah well, in the wireless biz, easy come easy gone.
And, don't forget, Duke sucks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Maybe, just maybe, anyone smart enough to get accepted into the nations top universities, is also smart enough to understand that even if your degree says PhD in Everything from the University of God, $125k in the hole is no way to start out life.
but maybe thats just me.....I only went to some cheap state school.
Very true, grades aren't the optimal method of determining skill, but they are one of the better methods of measuring a persons masochism (er... how determined you are academically). Knowing a student has the patience to do things he may dislike or outright hate is an important factor, hell may be the most important factor if you want measure someone by their earning potential only.
While I disgree with abolishing compulsory education in high school, I'd support giving high school students the same freedoms college students enjoy (study what you want to, set your own schedule, etc). Mostly because my experience as a teen makes me think most teenagers are horny and don't like schoolwork. They do however like freedom and the option to not take classes they hate.
Troll? Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today! ;-)
Screw the Mod points I've been sprinkling on this thread..
Its nice that Google hires guys with PHD's, and gives them stock options, and fat lives of luxury, but what about those of us that work hard as coders at small mom and pop software companies. They are obviously discriminating, right up there with the Navy Seals, they won't let you even try out if you have asthma! What about those poor guys?
When you have 50+ applicants for every single opening, you can go ahead and be choosy..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
i doubt any of this is in software these days. this has got to be an ARP storm taking down the receivers (essentially DOS "attack"). what part of the firmware does ARP requests? is the ethernet stuff built into the wireless chip(s)? does anyone know what wireless chip/chipset is in the iphone?
Sammy at IT/Personafile
An interesting factoid on this, though a little OT: iPhones do not appear to implement rendezvous/bonjour/zeroconf. I can't connect to any of my Mac zeroconf hosts by connecting through the *.local domain names that bonjour usually sets up, and I've read others are unable to do this as well.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
you can also simply be smart and hard working.
And how exactly do you decide to "be smart".
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
Stop whining and solve the frickin' problem.
That's what you are paid for. If you can't solve the problem, resign and let other more competent ppl do it.
How the hell did you get modded informative with that god-awful collection of misunderstandings and poor comprehension of clearly understood concepts? the ARP standard is unclear enough that it's undefined what the response should be for an ARP request to an unknown destination should be Umm, what?!?!?!
There's nothing unclear about the standard, except when you apply it incorrectly.
To begin with, there is no such thing as an "unknown destination" - if the address is unknown, how the hell do you send a request for it?!?! (You ever call 411 and say "Hi, I need the phone number for someone, but I don't know who they are, where they live, what they do, or anything about them.")
Now, if you're clumsily trying to say "there's no way to answer: what is the MAC address of an IP address that is unassigned", then that's simple - there is no answer (nobody responds, so therefore there is no answer - which means that the IP address is unassigned.)
However, if you're trying to say "what is the MAC address of an IP address that resides on a different network" then the answer is the same - there (again) will only be a reply if
a machine with that IP address exists on the network. IP networks are virtual - you can have many different IP networks residing on the same wire. If a machine hears an ARP request for an address that is not on it's network, it just doesn't answer (the inherit assumption is that there is another IP network on the same wire, and the request is ignored.)
ARP doesn't know anything about IP network layout - basically, machines just respond if they hear a request for their IP address. Theoretically, every packet that you send needs an ARP entry, which means that every packet sent to something that isn't in your machine's ARP table would generate an ARP request. No - every packet you send needs a DESTINATION (either broadcast, unicast, or multicast). Unicast packets (which is what we're talking about here) require a destination MAC address, but these destinations don't have to be resolved using ARP - it's quite possible to have some or all of them in a static table, if you like. However, it looks like you're just confused, because of... In reality, it seems that your router tends to substitute its own MAC address for non-local ARP entries (since all non-local packets go through the router, you really don't have to know what the real MAC address is) You are confusing IP and Ethernet (802.3, 802.11, etc.) networks. To ethernet, there is no such thing as a "non-local" packet - all packets are local.
When you want to send to an *IP* address that is not on the local link, you look up the IP address for the router(s) to that network, ARP for it (if you don't already know it's MAC address) and send the packet to it - there is no 'substitution' involved. You never ask for the MAC address of the destination IP address, you ask for the MAC address of your router, then send it the packet for forwarding.
There is a standard called proxy arp that does essentially this. In essence the router will start responding to arps for IP addresses on it's other interfaces. The valid use cases for it are virtually all bizarre and it can cause all sorts of horrific problems.
There ARE plenty of scholarships for the non 4.0 student, but you have to stand out in SOME way. I personally had a 3.3 weighted GPA in HS. I was accepted to MIT but they weren't able to find enough scholarship to make the cost reasonable. RIT on the other hand found me enough to make it cheaper to attend what at the time was the #7 CS program in the US (according to US News) than to attend an instate public university. It helped that I had a job, two independent studies, attended university part time, and was president and co-founder of two different clubs. As I said you don't always have to have perfect grades, but if you don't then you have to find a way to make yourself stand out from the masses.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
These are just the birth pangs of SKiNET.
But that's exactly the problem. The iPhone handshakes with a "How are you gentlemen." and asks for a MAC address, at which point the WLAN's response is "What you say !!" and it goes downhill from there...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Are these folks supposed to sit at home and collect welfare while illegal immigrants do the low-skill work?
You aren't looking at the situation with the right frame of mind. You assume that a business has some inherent sense of right and wrong. They do not. That's not to say they are bad or good, just amoral. A business earns profits. A business does not decide to hire illegal immigrants unless it will positively affect profits in the short run. If illegal aliens are cheaper than Americans, then they're going to hire illegal aliens. A business does not often contemplate the effects of its actions other than the effect on the quarterly earnings report.
Most illegal aliens, and legal ones, are accustomed to a lower standard of living than are Americans. That's why they are happy to work for less than an equally qualified American will. Just like when you first buy a big screen television and it seems huge at first but over time less and less so, so to do immigrants (legal and illegal) become accustomed to American standards of living. They demand more pay and better working conditions with time. As soon as it costs more to continue employing them than more recent immigrants, it means they've been "Americanized" and there is a need to replace them with "fresh" immigrants who have not been so corrupted. Over time the cumulative effect of this is that the expectations of the American working class slowly trends downward. It's not because we want less, or are more lazy, but because each successive wave of immigrants undercuts the expectations of the previous one in a never-ending spiral. Instead of playing along with the market forces of supply and demand, American companies are choosing to make an end run around the market by importing supply from other markets.
To answer your question, no business hiring illegals cares what unskilled Americans are supposed to do.
My money is on the issue being related to rendezvous / bonjour / zeroconf / whatever they call multicast DNS these days.
If iPhone is 'running OSX' (yeah right...) or rather enough of it to duplicate some of the network functionality, then we would expect to see similar network traffic that we see on a network of Macs which is usually made up of a constant stream of ARP requests as OSX constantly looks for other devices on the subnet to interrogate them.
Yeah but how will they distribute it?
:)
I can see it now, the patch trying to fix the iphones and keep the net up as fast as the unpatched iphones are bringing it down until eventually all the phones in the world ring at the same time.
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I would completely advocate a free, public higher education system that is better than our own. However, at the moment I believe that our hybrid system of public and private higher education is doing a good job. Actually that's an understatement, as it is the best in the world. Our mostly-public primary and secondary education systems, however, are lacking for a first-world country. Why force the over-achieving system to be like the under-achieving one, rather than the other way around?
Sorry folks, this message is incomplete info; I searched heavily to provide a supporting link but failed.
A few days ago ( > 1 week?) in the comments for an article subject I cannot recall, and engineer explained that the common bottleneck on free ISP hotsopts for VOIP use would max out at 4 client/sip-phones per access point, due to packet collision and *not* bandwidth.
That's what he stated the average Linksys-type unit can handle with SIP packets, as I recall.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
As long as the client device have their default gateway and routing properly configured it shouldn't matter if the proxy arp is enabled or disabled. On the other hand, if they use proxy arp to find the next-hop router (or default gateway) the amount of ARP traffic is significantly higher. If this is the case, the question is why not to deliver the proper default gateway by using DHCP?
-- Reality checks don't bounce.
Isn't it true that even if magically you didn't need money to attend a University, Duke would still have to limit it's admission?
And when they did, what would be the basis for those limits? How smart? How good looking? How successful some person thinks you'll be?
I mean, you've got to limit it somehow, Duke is private, they can make admissions anything they'd like.... hair color, how well you play basketball, family connections, even the ability to pay. Is that awful? Not really. My supermarket will throw out people who can't afford food. That doesn't make them immoral or even terrible.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
> Yeah but how will they distribute it?
Same as iPods. When you plug in to sync your iPhone it is updated.
If Apple can't make hardware that works, and/or won't own up to their problems and fix them, then ban all iPhones from connecting to the university WiFi network via their MAC vendor and device ID portions. After all that is what the structure of a MAC is for - so the network admins know what kind of devices are being used.
Banning iPhones campus wide because they are faulty would trigger some nice nasty press for Apple and piss off a lot of owners of the device - I imagine they would fix the problem much faster (or at least respond to the ticket!)
Tests for almost everything should not be testing memorization sorts of things. The reason is that bears no resambaliance to the actual reality you'll be working in. At work, if I don't know the answer I'm not only allowed but ENCOURAGED to look at Google, ask other people, check the docs, and so on. While it is useful for me to remember things I commonly need to know, I'm not expected to be a little database of information. WE've got computers for that and they are better than any human will ever be.
The math class that I learned the most ever in was a community college precalc class I took my senior year in high school (since I had a schedule conflict with the high school precalc). All tests were open book, open note, graphics calculators allowed, and you could ask the teacher for help. They were not designed to see if you could memorize shit about math, they were designed to see if you could do math when provided with all the proper resources. At the end of that class, I was an absolute ace at precalc. I've never learned more in a single math class before or since.
The more that a test relies on restricting your access to information to be hard, the worse of a test it is. I loathe CS departments (and ours is one of them) that insist that tests should be done on a pencil and paper with no reference. That's crap, because that's not how real programming is done. You aren't testing a person's actual knowledge or ability, you are testing how well they do in a contrived situation.
I realise that not all tests can be perfectly designed, but there's nothing wrong with making your goal to be as open as possible, and that includes the idea of a take home test, where there are literally no restrictions on what can be used as a resource.
Just wait until MS releases the zunephone! They ain't seen nothin' yet!
Also, let's be honest, this is duke. Next week, faculty will be taking out full page ads about the iPhone being a racist symbol of male patriarchy designed to facilitate rape. A 9 month investigation will find that duke network admins made the whole thing up.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm sure those are up to spec, but knowing the cobbled together nature of mose college networks...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Last man standing gets to keep the name!
He probably meant "adress request" as in "Your place or mine?"
Least I hope he did, or he was really missing out!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Is it possible that all of the iPhones at Duke are losing their cellular connection at once and/or since they likely all have the same time (ntp) that they have caches that expire simultaneously?
Isn't this more of an Apple or AT&T issue then than a Cisco issue?
My current cell phone (Samsung) burns a hole in my pocket as I'm on the fringe of its network at work--it continuously tries to get a good signal from the nearest tower, sleeps briefly, and tries again. Perhaps something similar is going on at Duke's network that triggers the flood.
I think if I was responsible for Duke's network, I'd outright ban iPhone's on the network until Apple or AT&T has resolved the issue.
It could be. On the other hand, maybe it's just Cisco's revenge for the iPhone thing. And it's hardly "one-way" communication, since what has happened is that they've opened a "ticket," and then "escalated" it. That means they've got some of the more pricey brains at Apple working at it. Hey, Apple and Cisco made an agreement to make their Wi-Fi phones compatible. Maybe this is instance #1.
Perhaps the Duke networking group asked someone to submit this to slashdot in order to solve their problem for them. Why do the legwork when all the geeks on slashdot will do it for you? *ducks*
Not bizarre at all.. it's used for subnetting. eg. your dept. has a /24, and you have 2 sub-departments that you give a /16 each. Proxy arp allows a router sitting on that subnet to respond to the arp request on the /24 block without having to reconfigure all the routers beyond it to 'know' that you're routing those specific IPs not responding to them directly.
It's more common than you'd think in companies.. especially large ones, where the IT infrastructure is very disjointed and getting any kind of unified address allocation is nearly impossible.
He was trying to be funny.
As was I.
I agree, and that is a perfectly reasonable choice that many people without the means to pay for a colledge education outright will (and probably should) make. It's a choice I made too, and I'm pretty happy with it.
My point was their choice to not attend the expensive school is not evidence that the tuition cost was sufficient to deny them access, just that the additional value of the education from that school as opposed to a cheaper one is not worth the additional tuition.
I don't know... here at the Politecnico of Milan, where I've been staying for the last year in an Erasmus exchange, they seem to manage fine. They have a dual wifi, one public called "polimi" and one private with hidden SSID and name "internet", secured with WPA "enterprise", tkip + tls. When you have your laptop on "auto-associate" -bad security policy! I've seen some rogue laptops offering AP's here...-, or just join the "polimi" network, every web request gets redirected to an information page explaining quite well how to set up a proxy. Once you do that, you login with your registration number and password, both of which were given to us at the beginning of the year, together with a smart card which is used to access the labs and the libraries, and you get to download a certificate (or its revocation). With that, just follow the instructions, install it, configure a network with hidden ssid "internet" and manually specify that it needs to use the certificate just installed. All of this, of course, with screenshots of every single step. When done, as the proxy is well setup because you had to do it for the "polimi" connection, it's just resetting the wifi and it joins the "internet" network fine and securely (but through a damned proxy, blessed corkscrew ;).
It seemed easy enough that an architecture student could do it on his own... =P And it worked on macs and linux (just converting the certificate with openssl it gets picked by wpa_supplicant). No more open-air traffic as in my home university (sit on the cafeteria, open kismet, begin sniffing passwords!)
(btw, to help to manually configure a proprietary wifi interface on a chinese laptop - on a CHINESE gui has had to be the most bizarre computing experience I've had till the date :D).
I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.
8 .html
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This fall total tuition and fees for most majors at Iowa State is $3080.66 / semester:
http://www.iastate.edu/~registrar/fees/tuition070
Minnesota: $4705 / semester
http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/costsaid/tuition.htm
Wisconsin: $3365 / semester
http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php
Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).
I think perhaps we just have different standards of bizarre.
And I don't doubt for a minute that bizarre setups are quite common in large companies. Lord only knows I see a lot of proxyarp related bug reports for our routing software.
Congratulations on your success
If we take the average of the tuition figures you cited (which I agree are representative) one obtains an average annual cost of tuition and fees of $7450. Adding the $6000 you cited for room and board and an additional $500 for books and other supplies (a conservative estimate for anyone in physical sciences or engineering,) one obtains a total of $13.9K I'd say that is 'approaching $15K' - especially within the 4 years if one started now and the current rate of inflation of educational costs continues.
The room and board costs are real and I think must be included in the analysis. You are correct about the ability to recover most of this if one can average 20 hrs/wk throughout the year at a student wage job. Given the course load (including labs, problem sets from hell, and any student research) many in the physical sciences and engineering majors find it difficult to maintain that level of work and maintain a GPA that will permit admission to grad school and qualification for a fellowship. These are always intensely personal decisions and require balancing many factors. My main point was that inflation of costs makes this harder.
...for clearing that up. I was wondering why his system was seeing requests from the American Association of Retired Persons.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
It must be official - I am an old bastard. I know that times have changed, and college is a different world now. I remember spending $2000 on my first computer (386DX w/2MB RAM, 80MB HDD). It was HUGE deal, and I had to work my ass off to save up for that. But it meant that I didn't have to go into the computer lab to do my programming assignments. No net access (we barely could afford cable), no cell phones w/$100 a month plans, no $400 music players. I worked all through college to pay for it, scrimped and saved, STILL had to take out loans to make it. How the hell are kids doing it today?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As soon as the ball team finds out they can wreck their exams with a coat hanger and a microwave, you can count on it happening every finals week.
See, you have an opportunity to educate here, and isn't that what college is all about?
Redundant? Aww come on, that was funny! And who knows, may one day prove to be insightful.
...the question he raised about free education is a debate worth having. Preferably without insults.
/. less useful for its unique purpose. I can go visit HuffNPuff or The Conservative Voice or lots of other sites if I want to consider politics, society-not-as-touched-by-politics, or whatever.
Agreed. So Slashdot ("Hardware," even!) is the wrong place for it. Reasonable people don't introduce off-topic issues and expect a reasonable discussion to ensue. Ignoring the "on topic" guidance makes
So can you, or so can anyone.
No, I'm not looking for a high level, Social Issues Barely Touched by Computing on Slashdot.
"Inquiring Minds Want to Know!"
"When it does not receive a response, it does it again, apparently about 18K times a second."
.06 ms ???
Isn't that a bit impatient? Is wireless fast enough to reply in that fraction of a ms ?? Is that not like
Even if it got an answer would it know it at that rate? And would it know which request the answer was to if it is sending requests faster than it can get an answer?
.....Leadership and project development in hobbies and non-profit work, standardized test scores, work experience, and essays are far better ways of determining ability than grades......
/. readers probably have at least some college, yet judging from some of the atrocious spelling and grammar here on /., it appears many are not all that good in handling "The King's English" any more.
First, I am sorry about the insult.
My daughter did have top grades and was the valedictorian of her class. However she also had many of the other qualities you mentioned. She earned a good portion of her undergrad expenses by the work-study program, but still had to get some loans. She won the county spelling contest as a junior, beating out her older sister by one word. Teachers and others who were in attendance at the school district headquarters, even now still tell us us that this was the most memorable spelling bee they ever attended. Most
She attended Duke graduate school on a full scholarship, after demonstrating outstanding scholarship and leadership as an undergraduate. In college, grades do reflect hard work and true understanding of the material. In public school, attendance is compulsory and educators have a vested interested to pass non-learners out of the classroom and school as soon as allowed, but they have to deal with them until then. The breakdown of the family unit is the largest contributor, by far, to the destruction of motivation to want to learn.
Whenever there is a limited resource, such as scholarships, an education or a well paid job, someone has to make choices based on certain criteria. I'm sure there will always be disagreement as to what those should be. All of the ones you mention are usually taken into account by good admissions officers. However, lets be honest, money does talk in this world, especially in the US. As a practicality, money can and does make up for a lack in some of the criteria you rightly held high. This world is not and never has been entirely "fair". There is also considerable disagreement about what constitutes fairness.
(....if you've had an expulsion or done significant prison time!......)
In college or job applications or even in getting insurance, past behavior is and must be taken into account. If there are a number otherwise qualified applicants for a single opening, the one whose record is blemished gets eliminated from consideration. Learning to do what you are told is very important in most jobs. Your boss pays you to do what he/she wants done and often how to do it, not when and how you decide. If you are asked to do something unethical or illegal, YOU alone have to decide whether you are willing to put your job on the line by disobeying and not do wrong.
Is a college education a privilege or a right? The founding fathers of the US recognized that there are certain "inalienable rights" for all and wrote these into the constitution. The right to an education or a job is not listed. Those privileges have to be earned.
There are many very important jobs that need to be done in our society which do not require a college degree and which generally do not have much prestige and/or pay. In a big city, such as NY, the striking of all the garbage collectors has a much greater effect on life there than when all the doctors or lawyers walk off their jobs. Unfortunately, but realistically, money is generally considered to be the number one sign of "success" in our society.
All theory is gray
I love that every single reply overlooks the *30,000* employees that I included in my figures. Yes, half the students are off-campus. But I'm betting most of the iPhones belong to medical, business, or law professors, not students. And the rest probably belong to grad students of one flavor or another (especially MBA students) who are taking summer classes. You're all acting like they all must belong to undergrads.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Any WiFi device can "bring down" a wireless access point. It is a shared medium, therefore it is an intrinsic property of the medium that any poorly-behaved device can knock all others off the network. No flaws int he network at all have to exist for this to happen. ANY wirleess device can be brought down trivially.
The only way to design it otherwise would be to have every wireless device allocate it's own communications frequency (which was not in interfering range of other used frequencies) at client negotiation time, so that communications didn't interfere with each other and they each had their own available bandwidth.
Too bad that would be totally unworkable in practice due to the extremely limited number of frequencies available, not to mention illegal since you're monopolizing the public spectrum.
Any router would appear knocked down because all the spectrum is being flooded with ARP requests so every packet is having collisions.
People gotta remember WiFi is a shared medium - it is not switched. It follows the same principle as an old fashioned hub. Anyone can flood the whole hub knocking everyone else out with collisions if they want.
I think you missed my point. The statement about "universal higher education" is a common one, and is inherently flawed for the reasons you give. I was simply suggesting that instead of making more and more "free" (a.k.a. everybody-pays) education levels, why don't we fix the ones we already have (and already have funding for) so that they're actually useful.
It's not a problem with businesses... they have requirements and minimum skill-sets that a worker needs in order to do a particular job. The problem is with an education system that is so horribly broken that there are high-school students that can't read or balance their own checkbook. Those people are unhireable, but not through any fault of any commercial entity. It's entirely a function of a failing education system increasingly bureaucratized and mired in its own legal and cultural idiocy.
Sooner or later, either bad LAN design or a product flaw will be discovered, and the offending party will have a mack truck sized helping of egg on face to deal with.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
This is in fact the meaning of the word 'code'.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
ARE BANNED FROM INTERNET
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Ah, good times!
I once crashed the LAN of a large-and-suddenly-very-angry bank about five years ago. I was just querying the mib-ii interface table of a LightStream via SNMP, nothing fancy. Default behaviour of a basic network performance tool, but for the 1010s it was a real problem. The LightStream had an entry for *every* potential VP.VC connection. Two problems: first, this meant that a bulk-get request was suddenly querying a few thousand interfaces (instead of the four or so channels they actually had configured). Second, it decided to give priority to responding to an SNMP query instead of doing something useful like "don't drop the network!".
As soon as I set the polling go - complaints could be heard across the office and I was quickly facing an irate operations manager.
Easy enough to resolve by just running get-requests against "real" virtual channels, rather than "potential" ones. But very daft default behaviour. And just subtle enough to get through testing in the test lab before going live.
I wouldn't be so quick to conclude as per the article that Cisco simply wouldn't be at fault!
I'm not acting like they must belong to undergrads, but I am acting like the number of undergrads in a school directly influences the overall size of the population of that school, and Duke is one of the smaller schools in the country. There are simply not anywhere near as many people on that campus as there are at other campuses (i.e. Michigan), yet because it's a school that for some reason is always front and center in the media's eyes, this is the school that's reported.
Hey thanks. It was meant to be funny. Guess the grumpy people are the ones who still don't have their iPhones yet? :-)
"I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form," he says firmly"
How do they know that?
Remember when Cisco sued Apple over the iPhone trademark (after slapping an iPhone Dymo label on one of their Linksys boxes)?
I'm sure Steve Jobs took that well. And I'm sure this is an innocent mistake in the iPhone firmware that will be corrected in the next release.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dumbass network engineers create giant flat network, iPhones with shitty antennas connect and disconnect constantly, network devices with too little memory and/or bad implementations of ARP protocol get freakin' confused...
ARP storms ensue.
Nothing to see here, move along.
(And these network admins must have missed the early 90's with lots and lots of hubs.)
Time to go back to network architecture school and quit relying on the Cisco TAC for brains.
Who hired the moron who went to the PRESS to fix his network problems, when his vendors let him down, anyway? That's the really interesting question.
Guy's obviously in over his head and hoping someone from Apple or Cisco will chopper in and rescue him. He probably even hopes, nay expects, that they do it for free.
Perhaps if they ignore him long enough, he'll figure out how to fix his own problems?
+++OK ATH
Belkin F5D7633 was much better for me than WAG54G V2, and more stable. So I second this
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
Stop whining that your daughter is one of the poor downtrodden who simply pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Your use of language, your vocabulary ("diatribe"), and your lack of spelling errors indicates that you are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent. Your use of commas and capitalization does need work, however. In your world your daughter's "hard work" meant studying hard - not contributing to the family cash in the sugar bowl. Even then, there is a lot more to "advantaged" than money. You are one of those people who are clearly blind to their own advantages in life, and who don't understand that it simply isn't as easy for others to advance. Your daughter is white, from a middle or upper-middle class family with a history of higher education, has never had to worry where her clothes or shelter came from, and YOU whine that she did it all through her hard work. I'm not criticizing your daughter who may very well be a wonderful person, I'm criticizing you, who have blinded yourself to your own advantages and whine that "anyone can do it". Well, not everyone CAN do it, no matter how hard they work.
Rather, it's more like a classical "popular misconception" in that it's really just what people would like to believe, not what actually is the case. Thousands of students are admitted every year lacking even the most basic skills like critical thinking, or how to write a legible sentence. Most second year University papers (and I have seen tens of thousands over the years), are on a par with what people of my generation were expected to be able to write in grade 8, and that is not hyperbole, it's a fact. The Faculty I currently work in has seen several PhD candidates over the last 5 years or so (successful ones!), that to all outward appearances have "sub-normal" (less than 100) IQ's.
All of these students when admitted had a high enough GPA to get in (good grades in high school), and the money to do so, yet they are essentially dead weight. They are not smart or accomplished, they merely got good grades in high school and that is a game that's also easy to play, especially with the right parents, the right race and the right connections. In other words, the right socio-economic status or "class." The vast majority of our students are upper middle class twits, with doctors and lawyers for parents and a luxury car to race back and forth to school with. They are not even academically inclined for the most part. They are "doing time" at the University, to get the piece of paper that will get them an upper middle class job through Mom or Dad's connection network. I should note that this is a very respected University, not some backwater college.
When I was a kid, I lived in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the area but some of the "hoods" were exceedingly bright, as were many of the regular blue-collar worker types. All of those people I grew up with are still back in the slum, working at their blue collar jobs, despite some of them being brilliant. I have never seen *anyone* (except perhaps a newspaper-worthy immigrant), from a genuine "poor background" go to University because they were so smart that it just had to happen. Universities are almost exclusively the purview of the upper or upper-middle class.
The example given of a man who's daughter "worked her way through Duke on a scholarship" is specious in that the man is not "poor" he is clearly middle or even upper middle class but simply could not afford Duke tuition. If the girl had not got a Duke scholarship, she would not have got a job at 7-11 the next day, she would have gone to a slightly lesser known University or College, or her Dad would have found some extra money somewhere, or both. Seen it a thousand times.
.....are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent.........
Indeed true, but that was NOT the case for my parents. The came to the US after WW2, with not much more than the clothes on their backs and in debt. Their education was not recognized at all in the US and none of us knew English. By hard work they were able to provide for their children. As a kid, to contribute to the family I delivered about 150 newspapers every day after school. I often walked to school, rather than spend the nickel transit bus fare, saving me all of 50 cents each week.
The same is true for my wife, whose parents came to Canada at that time. Both of her parents also worked very hard and instilled this work ethic in their children also. She and her brothers had to help run their family farm. Farmers get up early and so did they, working hard, before the school bus came and again after it delivered them home, after school.
We both have taught our children to stay out of or at least minimize debt and to never use a credit card for anything other than a book keeping convenience. The daughter I wrote about has taken this to heart and practices these admonitions. The other one has been less diligent in this regard and has gotten herself into a credit pit out of which she only recently climbed out.
Neither the US nor Canada had any kind of governmental welfare system in place back then. Handouts, including rent subsidies, food stamps etc. tend to discourage hard work. The advertising and credit industries encourage people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others they don't even like. It's not only the money a person earns, that counts, but even more so, the money one keeps through frugal habits.
All theory is gray
I congratulate your families on your success, however I see your success as being based on more than just hard work. There are clues in your reply... your parents' "educations were not recognized". I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe. That they could not bring their degrees or European status with them is a shame, but it nevertheless put them in a very different poistion from those whose parents may have never had any success. Starting over is a lot easier than breaking new ground. Your wife's parents owned a farm, well that tells me they too had resources. Sharecroppers work long hard hours too, but it almost never gets them anywhere. No one works as hard as poor people, not even farmers.
Like you, I used to think that anyone could get ahead with hard work, but I now know that is not always possible. My advantage was so subtle that it was invisible to me - I simply knew it was possible to get ahead. For many people who do not have any family member who gained success through education, college is as alien a concept as supporting a family as a nomadic herder in Mongolia would be for me. I know people do it, I know it CAN be done, but I could never just start doing it no matter how hard I worked at it. I would not have the support mechanism.
There are many intelligent, hard-working people who are trapped in poverty. It isn't because they don't work hard (remember, working hard for your daughter was studying hard, while working hard for a poor person may be having two jobs to support a family), or because they get rent subsidies, or are lazy - it is because they don't have that subtle background that lets them know what is possible, or even how to advance themselves. Its like riding a bicycle. It seems obvious how to do it once you know how, but you tend to forget how hard it was when you didn't know.
Sorry the iPhone doesn't run AppleTalk (or the underlying DDP) but my Mac SE/30 did...
- Time to upgrade your knowledge and start using a calculator instead of an abacus.
..... I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe......
Your suspicions are not correct. I am an engineer. My father was a chef and baker and got a job at a bakery and my mother was a nurse, but had to take a job as a cleaning woman at minimum wage. My wife's parents managed to save enough money for a down payment and borrow the rest from a friend. Paying off that loan meant doing without even the smallest extras and a very hard and dangerous job for her dad at a local lumber mill.
We know a young man of hispanic descent, born in LA, who was in prison until a little over a year ago, yet now has a good job with a road construction company. It is not an easy job for him, but we know he is a hard worker. It still is possible to get out of an economic hole by hard work.
Although there are some employers that needlessly require college for some entry level jobs, it is still possible to get good jobs as a high school graduate. Some employers are willing to train motivated young people. I talked to the owner of a farm machinery dealer about two weeks ago, at a wedding, who spoke very highly of the young groom he recently employed and will train as a mechanic. People who have a good attitude and high integrity level still are able to make it in our society.
All theory is gray
So you're saying that a poor kid who is able to get good grades and game the system can't get into your school? I have no doubt there are such schools. I also know schools that search far and wide students from lower income families with decent SAT scores so that they can demonstrate their "diversity." Of course they also search far and wide for rich, underrepresented minority students who pay tuition and make them look good but I digress...
With respect to your hoods, I would point out that things have changed a lot in the past say 50 years, so, depending on how old you are, that example may be dated.
You also ignored the most important part of my argument which was needs-blind admission. At these schools, the people who make admissions decisions don't even talk to the financial aid people. The only possible factor holding back an less-well-off applicant would be his "choice" (a better term escapes me at the moment) of high school. Even this is changing. For instance, when I lived in Houston, I discovered that there were many "magnet" schools, for everything from the arts to hardcore science. These were free and open to bright or talented students. In some areas, school choice has given poor students an out from the feeder-schools-for-prison type places.
Yes, public primary schools in this country by and large suck, however our private University's are world renowned. At least I proposed a few on-going solutions for the problem of education inequality at the secondary level. What do you propose to do?
So glad he got his comeuppance. In China they sometimes execute you for official misconduct. Not such a bad idea if you ask me...
Including room and board is fair, if we assume the students would otherwise be living with their parents. Including all of it is not. For instance, 18 year olds or whatever still eat when they live with their parents. They use electricity, water, gas, and all that jazz.
You might also argue that the parents also no longer need the space the kid took up when he goes to college. Now most people won't sell their house over it, but I know my parents got a nice guest bedroom when I moved, then a home office when my sister did so.
By the way, she went to school for free, and will be quite employable in a year, although mainly as a teacher (but that was her decision).
There are plenty, just not at Duke.
If you are lucky enough to be black, native American, or any race of Hispanic descent, you might even get in somewhere like Duke -- who knows?
You can't, but you can start by reading and doing only sufficiently small quantities of drugs to avoid completely fry your brain. I'd say that would go far for about half of high schoolers...
At least I proposed a few on-going solutions for the problem of education inequality at the secondary level. What do you propose to do?
I guess I was a bit more forceful in my response than I intended as I seem to have got under your skin a bit, and I did not mean this to be that personal of a debate. I apologise for any personal offense you may have taken at my remarks, but being one of those smart guys that had the bad luck to be born in a slum waste half my life merely to claw my way into respectable society, I guess I might have "issues" about socio-economic status in general and the colossal failure of the educational system in North America. :-) My bad, my bias I guess.
I am certainly pleased to hear (if true), that some schools in your area actually seem to *actively* seek out poor kids who are smart and take them under their wing, but I would argue that this is far from the norm. I was making a generalised argument about higher education as I have experienced it, not trying to say that "no school anywhere" is any good.
However I do think that I have the experience and the background to support the comments I made. I have personal experience of the situation from both sides. First, from the point of view of being denied opportunities due to my "class" in my youth, and secondly from working for almost 20 years at an Institution of "higher learning."
My point was that the old saw about "if you have enough hutzpah and drive you can still get a higher education and succeed, blah, blah, etc...." is simply not true. Historically, this idea (usually related more to a capitalistic or economic success story), is one of the central myths of the American people, so I can understand people's unwillingness to let it go, but that doesn't make it true.
The occasional person that "pulls themselves up by their bootstraps" does not invalidate the reality of the life-long struggle of those people who don't make it because they had the unfortunate luck to be born poor. Sure, there is the odd "rags to riches" story; there always is. However, this just disguises the fact that the vast majority of people born into the "wrong" socio-economic class *will* have horrible lives and little economic and social success relative to those born into the "right" class. If Universities are about "higher education" (and they all say they are), then the students should be picked on the basis of quality of applicant, not how much money they have or how well they played the "high-school game." They currently are not.
The fact is, there are huge numbers of "the poor" that are smarter, harder working and better learners than some of the idiots that walk the halls of University nowadays. The fact also is that there *are* large numbers of students already enrolled in University that are (to put it nicely), "dim" by my standards, (which are the standards of the 1960's roughly), that are *poor* learners, and *not* hard working at all (cheating is rampant). I see this every day. The injustice of it bothers me.
I stand behind my observation that it is significantly hard, bordering on the impossible, for the average truly "poor" person to get into University. The reasons are multitudinous; it's about what kind of life you have to live when you are poor and the whole socio-economic experience. When most people think about this issue, I find they are really thinking about how they can help other middle-class people that don't quite have the tuition, get into University anyway.
They are not really thinking about "poor" folks, because they don't know any.
As for what I "propose to do about it," I can propose all kinds of things, but in my position I don't have the power to do much of anything. I would suggest that it will take nothing short of the complete revamping of the Higher education system in North America to solve this problem and I just don't see that happening anytime soon. The major factor that I see contributing to the mess
No problem, I'm not easily offended, and I didn't mean to insult you at all.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'll leave it at that since we're too off topic. Perhaps we can discuss education solutions in another thread sometime.