Student dorm does not allow wifi routers

That seems pretty standard stuff. My dorm had the same policy, because they operated their own mesh network and didn't want students sending out their own radio signals that would have absolutely made their wireless network not work well.

Is there some reason you need your own router?

ETA: The student dorm people probably meant a network switch. Regular, non-techy people don't usually know the difference between a router and a switch.

psst

Hey, kid, don't tell anyone I told you about this

Lifts coat

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The reason they don't want you using your own WiFi access point is probably because dorms are prone to over congestion if everyone sets up their own WiFi network.

If you wanted to fuck with them-and you don't mind spending money-then you could set up your WiFi and get internet via mobile carrier or starlink, so that you never actually have to agree to their terms. Then when/if someone comes around to removed at you you can watch them slowly come to the conclusion that they've got nothing on you.

Otherwise your options are to follow the rules to the letter and live without vr streaming, or accept that you might get in trouble. Some WiFi routers can be configured to not advertise their network; annoying because you'll have to manually enter the network information on every device, but it might keep you from getting caught.

As for connecting multiple devices without paying; there's probably some creative ways to tunnel all your traffic through a single device to get around that. Could still get you in trouble if you're caught.

If you're doing anything that could get you in trouble with the school make sure you save the email in which they told you using your own router is allowed.

You shall not use or attempt to use a device or software (such as NAT, Address Masquerading, Proxying, or the connection of an additional wireless router) that would allow you to connect more than the number of devices set out in the Service Information to the Network.

One of the ways they detect this is by checking the TTL of the packets coming from the "one" device is less than expected. If your router is using OpenWrt, you can configure an iptables rule to reset the TTL of outgoing packets to the default.

So most dorms don't want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.

You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they're the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.

A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren't really a great way to do that).

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Business-LGS105-Unmanaged-Enclosure/dp/B00FV12VSW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?crid=3PUXDK6TFLZIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zm2b2eGNCSReGFJuUskv6-s3cUVDK12lfqOmf729Jjx1nw8mI07xRjx4RZCcnWDhplIUW-7IOfSn6R7TMu0yVy_k9hGXtOs0SNS7RO8sN4RI5aa_8-iwSOXz6biaUH5pE27eM8eYyBzJl9tkYxX4erfrbMwkWwhSrqIKQGOSqx1DQ1z5ZiDGCyQ_u0k8IhaN1Ra-Zpsr07cg-ZjJnDz6lA.iHHYMOhPc6OW0LmOOPkf8taxFxWnD5Sbwy_NxZwTQbU&dib_tag=se&keywords=network+switch&qid=1725717407&sprefix=network+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1

As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don't operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.

Mine didn't either when I lived in a dorm. I got around the network block.

1. Plug Xbox 360 into ethernet wall port
2. Log into uni network, get internet
3. Plug router directly into pc.
4. Assign router same ip as Xbox
5. Spoof router mac address to match xbox
6. Unplug from pc
7. Quickly swap cable in wall from Xbox cable to router cable, Indiana Jones style
8. Internet for 1 month. Repeat monthly.

I work in university IT so I have some experience here. Some schools are better than others but in general providing IT services for students is like trying to wrangle a herd of starving feral cats who are all in heat.

First of all I have never seen 802.1x implemented (Ethernet authentication) in the wild that wasn’t almost immediately removed. It’s a shitty protocol that’s terrible to debug. I totally get why they restrict APs … my god if every student had one it would be a pain. It would be like standing in a crowded room with everyone shouting and you’re trying to pick out one conversation 20 ft away.

My guess is you’re basically in a situation like my son was at ECU. It’s likely not really a university dorm but closely affiliated hence the reason of a third party. Or the central university IT is abysmal and can’t be bothered. Either way the only reason to use 802.1X is because they think it’s more secure, when in fact it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. You can do the same thing by controlling downstream routing or MAC filtering. The ECU “dorm” did that and it wasn’t much better honestly. You had to go into a website to add your MAC address to get access to the WiFi. Firstly how do you do that when your computer can’t talk to anything. Chicken and egg problem. Secondly for the ones who figured out how to do that using your phone, good luck getting a history major to figure what even what a MAC address was.

My suggestion is don’t bother. If they’ve implemented 802.1x they’re a micromanaged IT and will catch you eventually. I’d also guess they have completely overtaxed their egress traffic and your speeds are abysmal.

On a related note, when you graduate never ever rent from an apt complex that generously process WiFi or Ethernet. It will almost always suck, they will have no one to provide adequate tech support, and they are just using it as another revenue stream.

Sorry I don’t have better advice but if they control the network there isn’t really much you can do.

This isn’t rare and not altogether a bad idea.

My university had a problem of students bringing their own WiFi routers before the dorms had WiFi. Students would set them up incorrectly and cause a series of problems with colliding DHCP servers and interference and it would cause outages for nearby wired students.

A lot of IT departments locked the network down for these reasons.

Users are often dumb. Imagine 100 people who think they know what they're doing trying to set up a bunch of custom networking.

That's your dorm.

Most dorms either outright prohibit using personal hardware like that or require the schools IT department to install it themselves and set it up.

Run a network of your own someday and you'll understand. It's hard enough to get your own network working perfectly without a bunch of wildcards popping up everywhere.

Shit, ask4? I think they were the isp when I was at uni about a decade ago. I'm sorry to hear they're still kicking.

If it's still the same as back then, all the dorms are essentially on the same lan and they're using Mac filtering at the gateway. Since this was before Https became ubiquitous this meant you could sniff other people's http requests.

What you do (what we did) was sign up with one device and setup a proxy on it. I think we used squid-cache. But anything that will masquerade the traffic as coming from that one device should do the trick.

pretend you didn't read it and press the button

As someone who has administered networks and written policies like this the concern here is that you will run an open network that may be used for piracy, hacking, DDOS or to send bomb threats. Tracing down this type of behavior is required by law and allowing students to run open networks makes this near impossible.

Assuming they have their own wifi, they just don't want you using wifi off of your own router. A wired connection should be fine.

If you are really worried about getting caught not following the exact rules as written, you could always pay for multi device connections... then they won't care.

But it's definitely possible to set up your VR router in a way that is not gonna bother anything. Most people in this thread don't know that your VR router doesn't need internet access. If the VR stream is all it is doing, it can be isolated from the internet, and the isp won't know or care it exists.

The other thing about rules, that they don't tell us autistic people, is that following rules is actually kind of optional. Certainly more optional than it feels like to us. Think about it in terms of what the people were thinking when they wrote the rules, and who will be enforcing the rules and what they will care about. And what the enforcement of the rules would look like. (In this case, the most likely initial outcome of them enforcing these rules would be either an e-mail or paper letter telling you they noticed you are breaking a rule, possibly with details to help you stop breaking it, but likely not). Try to sus out the "spirit" of the rules rather than the letter of the rules. That is how all the other humans use rules and why to us it always feels like everyone is breaking all the rules and getting away with it.

If you follow every rule to the letter... you really can't do anything. At all. Like, literally, even we are breaking rules we don't yet know about every single day.

Not a lawyer but if you have an email that says you can, I'd argue it's override the ToS assuming the person giving permission actually legally can.

Anyway I bet what they avoid is reselling access so I believe as long as you don't pay for yourself then resell to others you'll be OK.

Looks like that tos is just for the wifi network, if you've got an ethernet port then that won't be using the wifi.

As someone whose job it is to deploy and manage wifi at a small university-adjacent student accommodation, these are similar to my rules. There are enough students that know enough to cause a problem, but not enough to know the pitfalls. It's best to just blanket cut this off for everyone's best experience.

Using your own WiFi router also bypasses the wireless security settings to access the school network.

Some resources are only available while on the network (printers, access to library, academic papers, other student hardware). Now imagine a random person in a coffee shop next door had u limited access to these resources via an unmanaged access point.

Are these restrictions set out by the ISP or the dorm?

If you don't do business with the ISP, then you don't have to agree to and follow their terms.

So as long as the dorms doesn't have rules against setting up your own WiFi, then you should be well within your rights to purchase an Internet connection from another provider, but since you are likely not allowed to get your own line installed, you are probably restricted to ISPs that provide a service over the cellular network.

Of course using a cellular connection will give you worse latencies for online games, but at least you can have your own WiFi with low latency for your VR.

If you want to be nice, you could then run as much of your Internet network over ethernet as possible, so you congest the air waves as little as possible, possibly only running the VR headset over WiFi, and maybe even only enabling the WiFi radio when you want to play VR. If all your WiFi devices support 5GHz, you might also completely disable your 2.4GHz WiFi, to leave the most congested frequencies alone.

To lower the chance of someone complaining about your WiFi, you should configure it as a "hidden network", such that it doesn't broadcast an SSID, and therefore doesn't show up when people are looking for WiFi networks to connect to.

Connect your PC to the network then run internal networking as you like through a 2nd interface?

I would set up your router, turn off ssid broadcast and forget about it. It's doubtful they have the equipment to find an access point that doesn't actively announce itself to the world .

Edit: it means you will have to manually add your wifi network to your devices by typing in the ssid on them but other than that there shouldn't be any issues

They don't want you plugging in your own gear to their network, fine.

Get one of the "5G Home Internet" services from T-Mobile or Verizon, plug your router into that.

https://www.t-mobile.com/home-internet

https://www.verizon.com/home/internet/5g/

Not on their network, they have absolutely no say over it.

Not all that surprising. I don’t know of any network manager who’d happily allow rogue routers on their network, particularly if you still have it configured as a DHCP device and not a pass through device, which most college students do not consider and will very much disrupt campus network performance.

Name and shame that crappy backwards university.

Honestly this sounds like a bit of a pickle. If I were in your situation I would just use one of the cellular carriers 5g internets. I personally use a T-Mobile 5g internet hotspot with a fresh tomato flashed nether 6700 plugged into it. Then I basically do all of my networking from that. Latency is a fair bit higher (usually about 30-50ms) but upload is significantly better than spectrum.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the wording of the other rules below the highlighted one, I can only assume they mean you can't install a second router that they provide. I mean, it also says you can't install any "owner-supplied" devices.

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.

probably protecting against the 5g. people might be allergic to it.

I would go wired.. get a switch, run an Ethernet cable from the dorm wall to the switch then out from your switch to your PC.

That said the university is probably handling DHCP and dns.. You could use a USB WiFi plug to generate a hotspot off your PC. if you wanted to run your own wifi...

But honestly the dorms WiFi with you using a VPN to a major service is probably easier everyday use wise.

Let me just say this.. my college lost WiFi connectivity for about 2 months once when I was there.
The only people who had WiFi were the folks connected to the pirate wireless. Because folks were doing the wired device --> hotspot deal with their desktops.

So might not hurt to be prepared.

Also... The dns settings for your device.. you should set those. If you use DNS from your university... It lets them control what you can and cannot see on the net.

Is the VR streaming in the Local net (PC to Headset)? Just run the WiFi router without plugging it into the wall. Connect only the pc and the headset.

Also, appart from that, to use more wired devices, maybe use an unmanaged switch. Don't think that does anything forbidden here.

Robust but complex solution:

1. Set up an encrypted VPN at the router level. Any encryption will work, even weak dumb encryption is fine. Any attempts to decrypt it would be mad illegal.
2. Turn off your SSID.