School Connections

by graphak

This is for informational purposes only.  I don't recommend trying it.

While attending a well known and respected university in the U.S., I was naturally wondering about the Internet service in the dorms.

Inside of my dorm's closet, I discovered a panel in the wall that came off after removing a few screws.  I stared in disbelief at the number of possibilities that potentially awaited.  I could see water pipes complete with nozzles, television cables, and, best of all, the Ethernet cables that ran to the rooms above my floor.

The dorm that I was in was old but still functioning.  It was not due for a renovation quite yet, mostly because of money grubbing university presidential behavior.

For every floor there were about ten rooms which were supposed to house four people each.  That means that there were 40 Ethernet jacks per floor.

The cables ran up the same hole from the bottom floor to the top, so if I was on the top floor I'd probably only see four cables in the "secret" (what a joke) closet panel.

If I was on the bottom floor of the ten story building, I'd see 40 Ethernet cables running through my closet!  I decided to change rooms and move closer to the ground.

Immediately after relocation, I took off the panel in the closet and found an abundance of cables.  I decided to splice my Ethernet cable into one of them.  (This non-factory wiring job cost a very small amount of speed since Cat 5 cables are twisted in a certain manner to deliver best performance.)

My university had a system where individual roommates would pay for their own net service, so it was just a matter of time before I spliced into a cable that had been activated and was being paid for.  I then had no choice but to share the bandwidth with them, but it caused very few if any problems.

For one, it was a T-3 backbone i.e., very fast, and two, most college kids use the Internet for viewing pages that are not very bandwidth intensive.

I did this for two academic years without raising an eyebrow.

In my third year I lucked out and got a geek for a roommate, and shared his connection.  I had to clone my IP to his however, but the rest was the same.

I accidentally shut the school's network down for 15 minutes while testing some scripts, and guess who came knocking.

The IT guys recorded the offending IP and woke me up from a fake sleep to "check out my computer."  I played dumb and they went away, but not after changing my settings and telling me I needed to pay for the net from then on.

Moral: Not all schools are this oblivious or outdated.

However it might be worth a try to look around for fake or hidden panels if you live in a dorm or a pre-wired apartment complex and check for cables.

Also this year they changed the system and it now requires your student ID number, which is a whole other story and not hard to get around since most use a 9-digit number with the first three being mostly the same for everyone.

Check to see if your school is outdated and if you can get free high-speed Internet.  (It should be free anyway in my opinion.)