Network

[Tryptophan]

Seeing as ITS are perfectly capable of maintaining the data connection to the Fife Park computer room, surely it's within their capability to move the hall fibre from whatever dead switch its currently on to an alternative, like the one the computer room is on, or provision a backup backhaul link to the pc room and redistribute it from there?

Except that this would be far to close to customer service and too much like going out of your way to actually make the system usable. IMAGE:web.delphinidae.org.uk/rolleyes.gif

[munchingfoo]

Fife Park allong with DRA is on a ResNet server. The fife park computer room is on another uni classroom server. All of the network cards in ResNet are not registered on the class room server. Therefore even if it was just as simple as hashing some cables together you still wouldn't be able to get online.

It would be possible to do the things you ask, but the time involved would be longer than the time the network is due to be down for.

Also, once you had made this has, when ResNet was functioning again, the process would have to be repeated.

It's only down for two days. I think I had reason to complain in the summer when I went without connection in DRH for 3 months when they hashed a ResNet cable out to fife park only 3 meters away from my window. Grrrrr. But anyway, that is an aside. The main point is that it's basically two completely different internal networks.

[Tryptophan]

errrr.....yeah.....next time my pc logs onto domain "delphinidae", my local SMB network domain, and the internet traffic works shall I report it to ITS as a security flaw? As long as the NIC (Of the RESNET facing GW) is authed in DHCP..again nothing to do with the switches aside from holding copies of authed MACs, there is no reason in networking to stop the data, the only 2 things that might need doing are a) ensure the switches in question have the correct list of macs and update the GW address in DHCP/the router table.


Trust me, having set an unauthed nic to some ip in the same subnet as my box, and being able to see it (nbtstated it), when infact it was 15 B classes higher in its DHCP assigned address I know that inter-subnet traffic is un-affected (as long as it doesn't cross a a hall boundary, or wherever the auth filtering is done), except by ITS fiddling about with drop matches, mainly on port fields (handy things like port 21/80 et al :dammit:). Its perfectly possible, I've had to do it at home to bypass machines I've had to fix.

[munchingfoo]

As I said I am aware that it would be possible, but as I also said, the time used doing this isn't really warranted by the benefits.

The network is only down for 2 days and only about a tenth of the people who live in fife park and DRA are actually there. It wouldn't be approriate to spend time keeping the connection in our rooms available for these two days.

ITS get a lot of stick(Usually from me) but they do have a hard job to do. The uni network is huge and this brings it's own problems. Now I know they have plenty staff to cover these problems, but when they have hundreds of students coming in every day for minor things like fogotten passwords, oversized home dirs and the like, they must have a lot of work to do. They are obviously in the middle of some up grade or similar activity for the internet to be down. I'd much rather they got my resnet connection back asap than try to make a makeshift sort and increase the overall time.