A Nerd's Fury [updated with "official response"]
What in the hell is going on with AirBears? I swear, I can put up with a lot of the incompetence that goes with the territory of running a school, but this it too much. How can Boalt, which is part of BERKELEY, one of the top tech schools in the FREAKIN UNIVERSE, not have an operable wireless network?? It literally boggles my mind. This isn't South Wichita Community College. The implications of this go beyond me not being able to check up on celebrity gossip in class; people rely on the internet for a bevy of functional and utilitarian purposes during classes, such as taking notes online, sharing documents, checking wikipedia for more info on a case during class, opening the non-casebook version of the case in Westlaw, etc. These people (myself included) are completely hamstrung when Airbears isn't available. It's inexecusable - for Berkeley, for what we pay to go to BLaw, and for our needs during class.
Now I know IT is often a thankless job, and no one respects IT more than me, but it's time something is done about this. Spend all available resources at fixing the problem. Declare Defcon 8. I don't care. The rumor is that IT says it's a rogue laptop broadcasting a rival DHCP network that's denying access, but that seems like a crock of camel turds. If that was the case, then why are we denied access from all parts of the building at times? Checking my IP, I see that occasionally I get a 192.168.x.x IP assigned to me, but when I reload I have a seemingly valid IP address. After consulting with my fellow nerds, the problem doesn't seem to be a disgruntled student with a renegade notebook, but rather a failure of the Airbears to re-loan IP's that have been checked back in. Once you're in, you're in. But until Airbears can give you an IP, you're sans what Lindsay Lohan did last night, or maybe even more importantly, the ability to do ANYTHING that requires access to the outside world.
Administration - PLEASE FIX THIS. Everyone else - feel free to bitch and groan here, and maybe we can make enough noise to get this taken care of.
[see the comments for the official response to the Airbears problem]
Now I know IT is often a thankless job, and no one respects IT more than me, but it's time something is done about this. Spend all available resources at fixing the problem. Declare Defcon 8. I don't care. The rumor is that IT says it's a rogue laptop broadcasting a rival DHCP network that's denying access, but that seems like a crock of camel turds. If that was the case, then why are we denied access from all parts of the building at times? Checking my IP, I see that occasionally I get a 192.168.x.x IP assigned to me, but when I reload I have a seemingly valid IP address. After consulting with my fellow nerds, the problem doesn't seem to be a disgruntled student with a renegade notebook, but rather a failure of the Airbears to re-loan IP's that have been checked back in. Once you're in, you're in. But until Airbears can give you an IP, you're sans what Lindsay Lohan did last night, or maybe even more importantly, the ability to do ANYTHING that requires access to the outside world.
Administration - PLEASE FIX THIS. Everyone else - feel free to bitch and groan here, and maybe we can make enough noise to get this taken care of.
[see the comments for the official response to the Airbears problem]
Labels: Technology Rants
posted by Toney at 10:59 PM
22 Comments:
Hey,
http://ucbsystems.org/
There was a problem at the campus data center today, which affected wireless authentication as well as other services. According to that website, it was caused by an error with the load balancer - a device which, unbeknownst to most, is one of the most complex and confounding pieces of equipment that can be deployed on a network. While that may be no excuse, it at least may provide some consolation in this instance.
Though I feel you, getting the RFC 1918 (192.168.x.x) addresses randomly, waiting so long for authentication when there *isn't* a declared service outage. There are ways to stop this that the tech people just haven't implemented yet.
I've been having problems for the last three weeks, not just today. It's beyond minor inconvenience.
I don't understand any of the tech-jargon involved, but this is Airbears issue is so incredibly annoying. That plus the constant banging during income tax from the construction might just be the death of me.
Is this what its going to be like for the next two years once construction in the court yard begins?
I've also been having problems for 3 weeks, I agree this is a serious issue. And why the whole cumbersome login-with-your-student id thing in the first place? Information wants to be free, dude.
I think we can all agree that the banging during tax today was the best thing to happen all class. Next time internet is out during that one I'm going to try to start a game of marco polo.
Yeah, this problem has been going on since at least Sept. 15. I've gotten around it by manually inputting an address in the right subnet, but naturally, that sometimes leads to conflicts.
Airbears needs to be improved big-time.
Here is the body of Airbears webpage:
"For the past month, there have been significant problems in connecting to the campus wireless network (AirBears) at Boalt.
This problem is being caused by misconfigured laptops in and around the law school. Specifically, laptops that have internet connection sharing turned on are interfering with other laptops' ability to access the Airbears network.
Campus and the Law School are very concerned about this issue and we are working very hard to solve it and to take measures to keep it from recurring. Airbears has been running on campus for 6 years and this is the first example of this type of widespread problem. Unlike corporate wireless networks, it is impossible for us to have direct control of all the devices using our network while offering freedom and flexibility of access, which makes this problem particularly difficult to isolate.
You can help us with this AirBears problem. Please check and verify that 'Internet Connection Sharing' is not activated on your laptop. If it is, please turn it off. Instructions for checking and turning off 'Internet Connection Sharing' for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X can be found here:
https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/~ggonzalez/roguedhcp.htm
If you need assistance with the instructions, you can email studentcomputing@law.berkeley.edu and/or see the student computing staff in the computer labs located in the law library.
Solving this problem is our top priority. We appreciate your help. If you have any concerns, please feel free to contact Gabriel Gonzalez."
I'm calling BS. If a laptop has wireless sharing turned on, you would see that laptop as a separate wireless network. It would not appear as "AirBears". I've never seen a shared wireless network when I have had problems accessing AirBears.
I'm glad they are tackling the problem, but so far their responses have varied from "a laptop is running a rogue DHCP server" to "too many people are sharing their wireless connections". If South Wichita Community College can figure it out...
It's definitely a rogue DHCP. Actually, there at least two people with misconfigured computers. You can tell that yourself by looking up the hardware address of the router you connect to. I've personally seen two in Boalt.
The mystery is why they can't figure out exactly who it is. Airbears requires you to authenticate, so they could look through their log files to match the hardware address to a user id...
Most of the network problems (except some issues in the basement) are caused rogue dhcp server. 2:05: This has NOTHING to do with RFC 1918 beyond the fact that the RFC allocates the 192.168.x.x address space to private networks. Instead of consulting with fellow nerds do this: Run a tcpdump/packet capture on your wireless interface while your laptop tries to obtain an address via DHCP. You can do this in OSX from the terminal. From windows you will need something like WireShark. Look at the 2 DHCP replies coming in. One of them is for the AirBears address space, and the other is for the 192.168.x.x address space. The second response is from a different computer and not from AirBears.
As to the AirBears not re-loaning addresses issue. While this might be true, it is not the problem 90% of the time. From examining the traffic on my wireless network interface I can see that in almost every case (with the exception of attempts in the stupid basement) AirBears does in fact offer me a valid address. Unfortunately my computer seems to prefer accepting the 192.168.x.x offer.
Finally, lets talk about the "if someone was sharing their connection you would see another address" issue. This is also not true. There is a difference between sharing a wireless connection and "Internet Connection Sharing." If someone had put their card in "ad-hoc" mode you would see a different wireless network. That is not what IT is talking about. IT is talking about a laptop that is configured to share network it is already connected to. You can read about ICS here:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/ics_xp
Furthermore, ICS (and its Mac equivalent) basically work by having the computer function as a router and turning on a DHCP server on the computer. Hence the "rogue DHCP" server.
Now for a technical discussion.
The confusion here seems to be that a lot of technical people are blurring the lines between a layer2 and a layer3 network. In this case AirBears provides the layer2 network which allows computers to talk to each other and the AirBears DHCP servers. Your media access control (MAC) address is your address on the layer2 network.
The layer 3 network on the other hand actually allows you to communicate with other computers over Internet Protocol (IP). Your IP address is your layer3 address.
I think this confusion exists because typically home routers (e.g linksys) provide both features in the same "box". They provide the layer2 link connectivity, they provide a DHCP server to hand out IP addresses, and they also perform the routing that lets you connect to the internet. (Routing from a 192.168.x.x network to your internet connection). This is not the case on AirBears. When you connect to AirBears, associating with the network is the layer2 step, getting your IP address is the layer3 step in establishing connectivity. For a basic intro to the OSI (layer) model see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
Sorry for this poorly written post, I think it generally reflects the current state of my memo as well.
I use my fingers to push little buttons on my computer. It's really fun.
Patrick,
I agree that my post was really really long. Unfortunately I couldn't really think of a shorter way to explain the issue. Sorry. Maybe LRW will help will that.
Oh, it's okay -- I was only teasing.
Actually, I'm glad somebody understands this stuff, because I don't. Over the last three weeks I have tried beating my laptop with my fist, a hammer, and my copy of the federal income tax code, all to no avail. I'm running out of options.
12:51 - Thank you for the info. I now actually get it and see that I was mistaken.
However, the point still remains that it's REALLY REALLY freakin annoying, and given the amount of reliance we place at network access, it's detrimental to our schoolin' as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the info.
Yeah. The only thing more distracting than reading webcomics in class, is trying to get on the internet so I can read webcomics in class. I spent an entire torts lecture trying to figure out how to get my mac to drop all traffic from the rogue server.
I haven't succeeded yet :(.
12:51, want to be elected president of all computers?
This comment has been removed by the author.
I knew Boalt would not survive long without me.
my internet connection is shittiest at Zeb. the signal just appears to be way too weak and ALL the time. are we sure that there isn't something wrong with the wifi router or whatever it is in this room/part of campus?
10:47,
I'm pretty sure the N-S line is blocking your signal.
Gonzalez is a moron. He only has his job because he bends over for Mr Means.
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