Private wireless network for college dorm

[Smily1]

At home, I store several TB of shows and movies on my desktop, which I stream over wifi to my phone on laptop.

I'd like to keep doing this at university, but my college's wireless network restricts this kind of sharing, so I need an alternative. This would also be helpful since the official wifi uses WPA-Enterprise, which not all of my devices support.

I would like to create my own sub-network of sorts, but I'm not sure how to go about doing this. My university does allow students to use their own access point but not DHCP servers, for what its worth.

Thanks

 

[anotherdrew]

. My university does allow students to use their own access point but not DHCP servers, for what its worth.

Thanks

It sounds like they are happy to have you repeat the signal, but don't want you to subnet from their network (because that would potentially break the security). That would make it more challenging. You could easily create your own network that was not attached to their network, but then you would have to switch networks each time you wanted to watch a video ... kind of a pain ... would it be worth it?

I assume they are not providing Ethernet?

 

[jsmithepa]

Take their WIFI, make your own ethernet, they should be OK with that.

 

[bill001g]

I am very surprised that they allow you to use your own AP when they use WPA-enterprise on their wifi. Kinda stupid when you could just hook up a AP and leave it with no security at all which then leaves their network with no security.

So first you would have to have a ethernet port you can connect your AP to. I am going to bet if they use enterprise security on wifi they use port security on the ethernet. This in general prevents you from using multiple device attacked to a ethenet port. If a simple switch works then maybe you have a chance.

With commercial equipment they can easily use 802.1x with a radius server on the ethernet ports which is pretty much the same security as wpa-enterprise on wifi.

If I was the security guy I would have the ethenet ports locked down. Most commercial switches also allow blocking of DHCP servers so even if a idiot did it there would be no effect on the network.

If they really want to they can prevent you from adding any equipment and using enterprise mode implies they have some idea what they are doings. See if they have a recommended way for you to extend the network.

Now the method that will work on any system is to use your PC as the router and us ICS to build the internal network off the machines ethernet port. In the security world this has been discussed if they is actually a security exposure but the conciseness is that it is no different than a user giving someone else his userid and password. Since everything will pass through your wireless credentials you then are on the hook for any misuse.

 

[Alabalcho]

If the purpose of your own WiFi network is to be able to stream media from a single PC - make that PC WiFi Access Point, or connect a stand-alone AP to that PC' Ethernet port (assuming WiFi will be used to connect to college' WiFi).