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A Nerd's Fury

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.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on September 17, 2008 (boomark / email).