The worst part is that eBay charges a percentage of the final sale to the seller. It’s possible to lose money by adding one day shipping as a favor to the buyer.
This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.
When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.
Yep, that’s what I mean with VR streaming. The PC connects thru eth to the router, and the headset is connected to the router’s AP via wifi. I get the point about unauthorized access, but I set strong passwords and never share them. I think this clause is more about preventing me from connecting more than one device to the internet, which they want to charge me for if I do. Obviously having my own AP would allow me to easily circumvent that.
PC with 2 NICs would solve this surely? 1 port to the building for Internet, the other to your offline router which connects to your headset wirelessly
Give to a charity. Get an education that persues ecology or climate science. Fund someone doing ecology or climate science. Ignore the money and find a group planting trees. Plant trees. Plant trees. Plant trees. Plant.trees
It just says you can’t use things that allow you to connect more devices than agreed. Which means nothing without knowing how many devices were allowed to begin with.
Yeah that’s the thing… the max devices is one, unless I pay a fee (per device I think). This third party that manages the internet offers a bunch of upsells in the account creation for stuff like more devices.
I would go wired… get a switch, run an Ethernet cable from the dorm wall to the switch then out from your switch to your PC.
That said the university is probably handling DHCP and dns… You could use a USB WiFi plug to generate a hotspot off your PC. if you wanted to run your own wifi…
But honestly the dorms WiFi with you using a VPN to a major service is probably easier everyday use wise.
Let me just say this… my college lost WiFi connectivity for about 2 months once when I was there.
The only people who had WiFi were the folks connected to the pirate wireless. Because folks were doing the wired device --> hotspot deal with their desktops.
So might not hurt to be prepared.
Also… The dns settings for your device… you should set those. If you use DNS from your university… It lets them control what you can and cannot see on the net.
Yeah, that’s what I did at my previous dorm (which didn’t have a third party ISP trying to sell stuff to students). I brought that same router to this one because they told me it was fine, but now I’m faced with these T&C I didn’t know about from a third party.
Not all that surprising. I don’t know of any network manager who’d happily allow rogue routers on their network, particularly if you still have it configured as a DHCP device and not a pass through device, which most college students do not consider and will very much disrupt campus network performance.
Why does the dhcp on the router affect the main network? I’d think if it has its own network the main network would only need to deal with the router, as opposed to all the devices connected to the router if it was passthrough?
Because that router will be broadcasting DHCP signals and offering IPs, conflicting with the authorized DHCP servers on the network. This wiki article will probably explain it better. I’m not so good with the words an such.
I don’t know much about networking but that page seems to be about someone else setting up a dhcp server without the knowledge of the administrators or the users. In op’s case the concerns about mitm attacks don’t apply and the other concerns sound like problems that could arise in cases of misconfiguration or if the users aren’t aware they’re connected to a different network. I also couldn’t see anything about it affecting the main network’s performance
I mean, it’s all right there in the first two paragraphs. Keep in mind that by DHCP server we aren’t talking about something specifically set up by people with malicious intent. A home router is a DHCP server when not configured for pass through. Students who don’t know how routers actually work (we can’t all be IT nerds, lol) plug them into their dorm Ethernet jack, and now you’ve got an unauthorized device offering IP addresses that conflict with the authorized DHCP servers, which can quickly start causing issues with any new devices trying to connect to the network, and existing devices as their DHCP leases expire. Also keep in mind that we’re talking about a college network that will likely have local network resources for students like shared drives that would not be accessible to anyone connecting through the rogue device. Your IT department will quickly start getting complaints about the network that are caused by an access point you have no control over.
I’m assuming OP is at least smart enough to know that the port that’s on its own/a different color/somehow different from the others is the one that goes into the wall. It sounds like they have at least that level of competence.
No. I’m downvoting because your first comments stated it will happen if the router is set up to offer leases. Not that it could happen if a user ignores the quick start guide that says “plug this port into the wall.” Then got all pissy with that other guy who pointed out that your article was about DHCP servers, not routers.
I’m not getting pissy about anything. That’s projection on your part, reading a tone that wasn’t there. Just because you’re in a bad mood today doesn’t mean the rest of the internet is.
Typically they do. Which is great until you get a student who doesn’t understand WAN vs LAN and plugs both connections into the LAN port. Never underestimate the power of a Stupid User.
Some of my other replies address that. Worked in IT on a college campus, and every class will have at least a few clueless users who just plug the cables into the LAN ports.
Should be, yes. At that point it’s a question of how well the network was configured. I’d hope this wouldn’t be much of an issue these days - I did graduate from college in 2011, and I’m sure (hopeful) campus networks have improved since my student IT job days. These days my router config experience is from the ISP side. The only private network I’m responsible for is my own, thankfully!
I went to college in the mid-late 2010s and I recall they specifically banned WiFi routers, but when I checked what they meant specifically all they cared was that it didn’t broadcast on the 2.4 or 5 ghz spectrum and if it was all wired I was fine.
Ah! I just saw you specified if it’s configured for pass through. If it is configured for pass through, then yeah it likely won’t cause issues on the network. The DHCP server is the critical bit.
From a network management perspective, though, they still won’t want these because you have to trust all these college students are going to properly configure their devices - most of them won’t know how and won’t bother figuring it out. And then you still have the issue of a bunch of unmanaged access points to your network, which is just poor security.
Ah yeah just saw they specifically want to connect a VR headset wirelessly. I’m not real sure how to approach that either, if there’s any kind of port on the headset at all they could potentially adapt it to RJ45 but that defeats the whole point.
If a wireless connection is a must OP is just going to have to disable SSID broadcast, restrict it to certain MACs, and try to lock it down as much as possible and hope for the best. If they do it right it’ll won’t interfere with other devices and no one will ever know.
I’d be happy to set my device to passthrough mode, but I think the ISP prevents peer-to-peer connections (which my laptop would make to the VR headset) unless you buy one of their plans for Chromecast/smart TVs. Would that prevent it from working? And would I still be able to connect multiplw devices despite their one-device limit?
It’s hard to say without knowing all the details of how the college configures their network. Back when I was in college, I had a student job with the campus’ IT department, and students running into issues getting all their devices connected was a regular issue at the start of every year.
The main problem with most college networks is that you’ve typically got an enterprise setup that’s also having to double as home internet service for those living on campus. Depending on when the network was built it was likely only planning for students to have a laptop, maybe a desktop too, as opposed to modern times when just about every electronic device has an internet connection.
Some things just may not work like they did at home.
That’s fair yeah. In my case the dorms are a separate unrelated company from the uni (they just have a partnership) and the ISP is yet another third party that did the install and sells extras to each student. I think it’s pretty scummy since I read my whole dorm contract and it never said this would be a condition to the “free fast wifi” access.
Eww, yeah, that sounds like a crappy setup to milk more money from students with no other option - especially if you’ve got student aid requiring you to live in school housing.
You may want to see about getting your own wireless carrier internet service. Not the best solution, but at least it would be yours and unrestricted.
Fair enough. My recommendation would be set the router to pass through and see if it works. Just secure the wireless network created by your AP - be a responsible network policy violator!
I don’t really have any other ideas that wouldn’t involve additional hardware, which doesn’t make much since give the short time you’ll be there.
Is there a limit to the number of devices allowed to connect that this rule is trying to enforce?
Either way, if the vr headset doesn’t need internet connection you could connect your computer to the internet wirelessly and to your own router via cable for vr.
I was at a tech conference job fair and chatting with a bunch of former game programmers.
I absolutely messed up when I asked one guy who worked on a famous game why they decided to do X feature, and if that was the reason for the game’s failure.
He looked me in the eyes and said something like, “I get orders from the business execs. So even if their ideas are obviously bad, if I don’t do it, I get replaced. After the game is released, good or bad, I get replaced. If the game doesn’t even get enough funding, I get replaced.”
I just want to say that I’d absolutely love a dog that is genetically engineered to eat vegan food. Not just be able to survive off it but actually like it. But still retain it’s instinct as a guard dog / social hunter.
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