Making a dorm room wireless?

[anandfan]

My daughter is going to WSU (Washington State) next year. The dorm rooms all have wired net connections. She has a laptop and I thought it would be nice to hook up a wireless router to make the room wireless, with MAC filtering, etc to keep others off and with DHCP turned off so it would be basically just a switch.

Anyone done this? Any problems?

 

[anandfan]

Just found this thread by searching the archived messages:

College router pains

Apparently, some colleges will ban you from their net if you have a wireless router. Worried about security problems. I thought the MAC id filters would be enought protection, oh well... I'll talk to WSU in the fall to get their policy at that time.

 

[AFB]

They may also be worried about interference with there own wireless lan.

 

[InlineFive]

Wireless and secure don't go together. Period.

But all you need is a wireless router and a notebook with wireless ability (either integrated MiniPCI or a PCMCIA adapter).

-Por

 

[perry]

I used to do tech support at my school (graduated in December)... We didn't allow students to have their own wireless setups in their rooms (even had a no-support policy for wired routers). Network Services guys would walk around with some sort of sniffer and find (mostly unsecured) WAPs then shut down the port. Not sure how thorough their testing was, but it was enough to catch several people each time they did sweeps. Students would call us and complain that their Internet is down, and we'd get to explain why. If they were caught twice, they were off for the rest of the year. They actually shut one down and four or five rooms called because they were all using that one WAP and didn't know it...

Best bet is to wait until she gets info from the housing dept and see what they say. Our pamphlets specifically said no wireless in the rooms.. Maybe put in a phone call to the residential networking folks and see what they say -- don't trust the RA or orientation leaders as we had some folks that said their RA said they could have their own routers and such.

That said, there was a guy that worked for us, and lived in the dorms, who had his on WAP in his room.. but he had it secured so that only he could use it and never had a problem.