Behind the Scenes at MIT's Network 118
BobB writes "MIT's head of computer networks and security gives an inside look at how the techie school is fending off hackers, cranking up its network to handle voice over IP and become a fiber network operator to link to other research institutions. From the article: 'Q - How do you actually enforce security standards among MIT's departments and network users? A - Enforce is not a word you can use at MIT. We try to entice people to do the right thing. We've made a lot of progress. We've removed the financial incentive to run your own network, which used to be cheaper than having us do it. We've been a cost-recovery network since forever now though. At many universities the network is free and they just fund it out of operating costs.'"
Public IPs (Score:5, Informative)
And all computers (even student machines) are connected directly to the Internet - no NAT, no firewall, no protocol limitations, no bandwidth caps.
The catch is that all computers need to have a registered MAC address in order to get on the network, so if your Windows machine gets infected with a virus, they can disconnect you in a hurry.
It happens, but not "standard." (Score:5, Informative)
I know there are quite a few schools deploying it strategically, which seems like a good plan. It only takes a few minutes walking around a college campus to realize that there are a few key places where wireless would be most useful, and a lot of places where it would probably be underutilized. Libraries are huge -- go into any uni library and you'll see rows of people typing away on laptops. If you can't afford to put an Ethernet drop at every study carroll, wireless is the next best thing. (Well, actually, both would be best.) Study lounges and communal spaces are probably next, followed by cafeterias and big lecture halls (if you want to encourage people to use laptops in class; some schools might have faculty that would rather discourage that). In warm climates, outdoor locations can be great locations for Wifi, too.
But deploying it all over a large campus would, for most schools, be impractical. It would take too many base stations and would cost too much for the number of users you'd probably have at a time on most of them. I think if you did roll it out everywhere, you'd probably find pretty quickly that some nodes took huge amounts of load, while others were basically never used. For this reason, most large places with a competent IT staff don't just shotgun it all over campus, but are more selective.
Re:MIT on wireless security (Score:5, Informative)
The article is talking about efforts to develop and support new uses. In particular, it is surveying new uses for wireless devices at the moment (the most public being an opt-in program that will tell you where your friends are connected to the network in real time).