Technology

Man, things sure have changed since I was in college. The university had one /15 and three /16s so every single ethernet port everywhere on campus had a publicly routable IP.

Napster was so goddamn fast...

I can't comment on the 'device limit' as I don't remember being a thing, but I was at an ASK4 affiliated living quarter 5 years ago or so.

Back then I was able to plug in my router just fine. I disabled WiFi on it since I didn't need it and used it as a regular switch just fine.

Pretty sure you could end around their TOS by connecting a PC with 2 Ethernet ports to the provider's internet and connect your router to the PC with the 2nd port. In the PC's OS bridge the 2 ports together, and disable the routers firewall.

I'm in a similar situation. Before I had to move all was fine, I had a single ethernet port I plugged my router into. It even had a static IPv4 (even though no IPv6 but I could just use tunnelbroker). Literally perfect.

After I moved I'm now stuck in this horribly designed network that has a stupid internet cafe tier login portal even for wired devices, unencrypted wifi, seemingly every single device from every student on the same network (I am getting blasted with other people's broadcast packets and I'm pretty sure the network congestion from that is where my weird intermittent packet loss comes from). And now I don't have any public IP address at all.

Whoever they hired to set this up is an absolute moron who has no idea about network security or how to make an efficient network and considering the internet cafe login portal probably likes to cause as much suffering as possible. (Not saying I'm necessarily qualified but the fact alone that I can connect to other people's AirPlay devices means they failed at both.)

And the reason all of this is a problem is that they also don't allow putting a router/firewall in front so I can get a sane network. Had to tear down pretty much all the infrastructure I set up in the old place because a lot of it was relying on me having control over the network. Of course, I knew none of this before I moved in, I was explicitly looking for internet shenanigans in the contract.

I now have a janky Wireguard mesh network setup with one of the machines being the IPv6 gateway. Awful but at least I have public addresses and IPv6 (and with that a bit of my own network space) again.

It's a security\legal risk to allow adhoc wireless networks within your environment, pretty much any organization above a certain size has the same restrictions.

You could theoretically allow anyone to access your router directly, which would let them bypass agreeing to the Acceptable Use Policy, for example, shifting liability back to the organization for that users behavior.

Ignorance is strength.

Pretend you never saw it, plug your router in, and don't worry about it.

If they do ask questions, you just made a innocent assumption.

While you didn't name names of what app you were using for streaming, I just got into a similar situation with my dorm and what I found worked was using wired ALVR for my streaming. Not wireless, but good, long right-angled USB-C cables don't cost a fortune. https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/wiki/ALVR-wired-setup-(ALVR-over-USB)

So in regards to specifically VR, I'm just going to make the blind assumption that your headset is a quest 2 or something along those lines. For the time being on campus, you might just want to consider running VR through a physical USB-C link cable rather than jumping through so many hoops on the router setup. A decent cable will run you like $20 US or how ever that translates to local. The quality of the connection is generally about the same as wireless, the main drawback is usually a wired link can't put through enough energy to recharge you headset on top of the data transfer, so your battery will slowly drain over a few hours. There are also link cables that you can additionally plug your charger into so you don't slowly run out of battery, but I think the build quality on those is often sketchy. Either way something to consider.

I remember when I was in college running a hackintosh. I was at the end of the hall and had awful Wi-Fi reception, so I just had my desktop emitting Wi-Fi for me and my dorm mate. I pirated some stuff but never seeded. I told my roommate about pirating and whatnot and showed him how to pirate Parks and Recreation. He didn’t turn off seeding. The university banned my MAC address, but luckily I could spoof one and have internet. He had to go to the dean and tell him he was sorry and that he won’t do it again to get my hardware MAC banned so I didn’t have to change it every time I booted up.

The fact that it was so simple for me to get around this ban was hilarious.

My university was pretty zen about this

essentially, "don't use your own access point/router please. But if you do, please talk to your resident (University employed) student IT rep and they can probably help you set it up correctly."

I wonder if you could just use your PC to hotspot when you need to use VR.

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.

You can disable your router's wireless networking (or hide its SSID if you want to use wireless networking). It won't be an issue if you use either way. Since your dorm told you that you could use a router; these terms wont matter.

if you have what support soid in writing then ask student legal (most universities give you free lawyer access, use it) but in general specific advice like this will in court override what the eula says. The person who said you could should of course be fired but that isn't your problem.

in the us fcc rules say these are unlicensed bands and they cannot make those rules about any radio. However the eula seems to be about wifi use but connecting their network to wifi and that difference is in their favor. If you get your own network connection (how?) You can bring your own wifi but don't connect theirs.

I'm not advocating for breaking any rules, but many people dont know that you can hide your wifi routers SSID. even fewer people know how to track these networks.

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.

One option could be to get one of those 5G modems. It would require you to pay for your own Internet service, but many will then provide an Ethernet connection as an option, meaning you would never have to accept the legal terms presented to you. You could even use Wi-Fi because technically you never agreed to the terms, and practically speaking so many devices generate Wi-Fi networks I think it would be hard to enforce that you don’t produce any networks. Printers, smart watches, IP cameras… Are they really going to wardrive and triangulate the position of wireless devices on a regular basis? A sneaky network named after a printer or hidden SSID combined with ignorance for a TOS you never agreed to would probably slip through the cracks.

They don’t own the spectrum. I’m not sure it’s even legal to mandate that you can’t use Wi-Fi devices as long as you’re not using their network. When I was in university, there were still tons of such devices emitting signals that weren’t connected to the university network despite policy.