University Network Rant!

HumanMage

HumanMage

New Member
:mad: I've had it with college and university network connections. You have to jump through hoops in order to connect to a wireless network. Shoot, if I need to go to the library I might pack up my 25ft. cable and take it with me, it would save me a bunch of time:mad: I need to enter my student log in name, password, domain name etc etc...and it's not right. So I try a different one (I have three different usernames/passwords for different things internet related) and none of them work!!!:mad: I might be having troubles because I'm a transfer and something is missing on their end. But this makes me mad, every 5 seconds I get a bubble popping up "additional information is required to connect to eku_secure." ARG! whatever happened to entering your student name, and making your own password to connect to a network?

Rant Over:rolleyes:
 
My school is fantastic with wireless connections. In every single building on campus there is an unsecured wireless network which anyone can connect to. They have multiple routers in each building so I always have max signal strength. The only bad thing about my school's network is that in the dorm rooms you must register your computer's IP and MAC addresses so they can track your bandwidth use. If you go over 1.8GB of bandwidth in a day, you get throttled for 24 hours, meaning that your internet speed is basically cut to 1/3 the speed of what it was before. It can be quite a hassle.

Other than that my school is pretty good with internet and all that.
 
Look at it from this perspective...

Educational IT works off a budget, so they have limited spending and limited staff. They have large user base (sometimes up to 10,000 or more) and have to deal with security issues, ie Windows Operating Systems.

In the case where you have so many log ins, they should synchronize their LDAP so that all authentication methods point back to your LDAP credentials and they should secure it by issuing kerberos tickets for each user.

Easily said, hard to get done, only so much time and you can't really take servers down during the semester, that is just going to piss off a lot of people. Also, you can't rely on the user base to always have the latest security patches, and that is how self propagating worms and viruses crash whole giant networks.

It is a complete catch 22. You can't secure the network and have a flawless end user experience unless you spend the money for the staff to make it happen and the money for the right technology. Most likely they have a skeleton crew running your network back end and they only have time to just make it work, and are fixing problems every where else left and right and that doesn't give them the time to make the end user experience awesome.

Been there done that, still doing it, and it sucks for both parties, both IT and the end user.
 
Where do you guys go to school? I'm at University of Arizona and my school is like skidude's. I had to register my desktop's MAC address into the system before I could get internet access. And we actually have 2 wireless networks, a public and private. The private network is the one where we have to input all of our login info.
 
My university's internet is super fast but it you have to change a crap load of settings to get it to work....pretty lame.
 
Calibretto said:
My university's internet is super fast but it you have to change a crap load of settings to get it to work....pretty lame.
Click to expand...

The only things I could think of changing are the network proxy both in the OS and in the browser.
 
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