Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamH12113 | Hacker News Reader

>Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during this time?

When I was in college (2000-2006) you could fill out a form to request to run a server. I'm not sure how common that is today, but it's at least worth asking about.

View on HN

Back in the mid 90's, everyone on my college residential network had static, public IPs, no firewalls or filtering. Different times.

This was still essentially the case at my university ~3 years ago (and likely still is). There was a firewall by default, but it was a simple form to fill out to have it disabled.

True in the early 00's as well.

Usually resulting in a Windows computer being powned before patches could even be applied: https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time...

Note: The graph url is dead.

Yes, I remember this well.

I put an unpatched Windows 2000 machine on the network, and the system logs were littered with intrusion attempts—more than 500—after being online for a few minutes.

The difference in different institutions of higher learning is huge.

Some have entire IPv4 subnets. Others have a grand total of three public IP addresses to distribute across every user on the campus.

Yep - my alma mater, a technical school, has a /16.

Back in the late 90's, My roommate took down a neighboring universities network for a few hours over a dispute on a bulletin board. He was a TA for the engineering department and simply walked into the library, told the person behind the counter he was a TA and needed two professors email and password credentials. He then used those credentials to hack into the neighboring universities network (not very hard either - apparently a simple dictionary attack got him in as a root user) and start wreaking havoc under these professors names.

Yes for sure different times. Still laugh about how easy it was for him to get credentials which gave him a sort of 'super user' privilege's on our own network just by having professor credentials.

We had similar things happen around here, with "elite" BBS users hacking into the local college and university CS departments to get internet access. Mostly, they just wanted to get on IRC. Typically these were Sun-3 / SunOS 4.x boxes using YP/NIS. "ypcat passwd" would get you an unshadowed password file that you could start cracking...

This was true at my university, in the late aughts. Public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

… 15+ years later, and my ISP (Verizon) still hasn't caught up…

True in early '00s as well, and this is why I burned a CD with the XP service pack on it; code red would infect a fresh install of XP faster than you could download the update to patch the problem...

Oh man. Service Pack 2. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

In Sweden we don't really have the same kind of housing system you (I'm guessing US) have, but when I stayed in student housing we were hooked up directly with 1Gbit fibre to SUNET and got our own WAN IP that we could opt in (automated system, just go to a certain URL and click a button from the connection) to have all ports un-firewalled.

This was in 2014, but afaik it's been like that for the better part of the 2000s at the very least, likely the late 90s as well, though probably not gigabit at that point.

Still the case today (åtminstone på Chalmers)

My alma mater just gave each of our machines WAN IPs and the rest was up to us :) (this is recent, too. I graduated in May of '21) We could more or less host whatever, provided we followed the AUP. No need to file a request.

At my college (Rochester Institute of Technology), every device on ethernet and wifi gets assigned a public IP address from the /16 they own, with no firewall. I host my server in a club's server room. No cost or setup besides registering the MAC address, just a public IP address.

Hey, that's where I went! Guess they've continued not cracking down on unregistered servers.

This should really be at the top of the thread. It’s unclear to me if the student is making assumptions or knows about their new network. Many universities freely give out unencumbered public IPs, and/or may have VMs available for no additional cost to the student.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com