[287] in Resnet-Forum
Re: ResNet originating from students
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo D. Geoffrion)
Thu Jun 2 08:54:13 1994
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 94 08:37:06 EDT
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
From: ldg@skidmore.EDU (Leo D. Geoffrion)
>> Hello resnet-folks,
>>
>> I have been reading the proceedings and I have been wondering: it
>> seems to me than in all the cases discussed here, the initiative for
>> establishing a Residential Hall network is coming from the
>> Academic Government. In our case, we (= a group of students of
>> the Catholic University of Leuven) are working on creating such
>> a network ourselves and are trying to push the University in letting
>> us hook up to their backbone network.
>At our university there were and are some initiatives. Even yesterday
>we had a student wishing to talk about some netwerk he was planning.
This raises an interesting point. I'll bet many colleges are doing
residential networking without realizing it. There's a long standing
tradition among students of side-stepping slow-moving administrations and
improvising their own resources.
We had one such incident recently at our school (an undergraduate
liberal-arts college). We had extended a LocalTalk connection to the
student newspaper whose offices are in the basement of a high-rise dorm.
Within a couple of weeks, we discovered that some enterprising students had
purchased about 200 ft. of telephone cable. They extended the line out
their window, down the outside of the building and into a window of the
newspaper offices.
We removed the connection for safety reasons but did not punish the students.
We used this incident, along with a number of other arguments, to convince
the Administration that they'd better get moving on networking the dorms.
We're starting the hook up this summer, and I don't doubt that we'll
discover additional "unofficial" connections as we move through the
buildings.
=============================================================
Leo D. Geoffrion, (518) 584-5000 Ext. 2919
Associate Director ldg@skidmore.edu
for Academic Computing, FAX: (518) 584-3023
Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
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