Just arrived and already bored? Time to get online!

You’ve arrived at your new university and you’re already stressed out. You’ve got to cope with Welcome Week events, meeting new people and the challenge of moving into your new halls, and what you really need is a quick game of Modern Halo Call Of Warfare 2 Strike Deluxe to take the edge off! But, disaster! You can’t even connect to the lobby! How are you ever going to survive the year? Never fear Imperial noobs, for with our step-by-tiny-step guide you will have your console of choice online and ready to rock in no time.

Imperial internet is some of the fastest around, but in order to use it your device must be registered in the College systems

The first step is to understand the hoops you need to jump through in order to get yourself connected. Imperial internet is some of the fastest around, but in order to use it your device must be registered in the College systems. Registration is based on the MAC address of your device, which is a unique code that identifies your console or computer from all the others. The registration process ties this number to your College username, so College can provide and log access. So, all you need to do to get online is to register your MAC address. Easy!

Well, nearly. Registration happens when you first try and browse to a web page, and is done through your browser. So for consoles with a web browser function the easiest way to perform registration is with the console itself. However, this is a problem for consoles and other devices lacking a web browser function as the registration page will never be reached.

One solution is to get Imperial’s ICT service to register your console for you. You can find all the information online at imperial.ac.uk/ict, and if you use the generic request form there is an option for “registering a device or computer for network access”. If you do take this route you’ll need to provide information about which network port your console is plugged into, your college username and CID and possibly anything else the technicians would like to know.

While this is by far the recommended solution, it can take some time especially during the start of term when lots of new things need setting up and configuring, and for some reason registering games consoles doesn’t seem to be a priority. You might choose to take the situation into your own hands to speed up the process. One way to do this is to temporarily change your computer’s MAC address to that of your console and then register the MAC in the normal way using your web browser. Please note that is against College ICT policy and therefore I am too much of a pussy to actually recommend you do this.

First, you’d need to work out the MAC address of your console. Connect your console to any networking port on your computer or laptop and wait for it to aquire an address. Then, on Windows, open Network Connections and then the Status window for the port to which you connected the console, and click Details. The ‘Physical Address’ is the code you are looking for, and once you have it download the free MacMakeup tool from http://tinyurl.com/6b7b6. Follow the instructions on that site to change the MAC address of your Internet connection to the one of your console, and then proceed with registration in the normal way. Boom, you’re done! Don’t forget to change the MAC back after, though! Again, this is against College policy and so you do it at your own risk.

One even more illegal method would be just to use a router or share your computer’s internet connection, but this is even more explicitly against College policy so I shouldn’t even mention it. Oops, did I say that out loud?

So now you’re online, all that remains is to load up your favourite game and blast away to your heart’s content. Enjoy!

Response from ICT Network Manager:

_Dear Sir, _

_In the Freshers’ Issue of Felix Simon Worthington wrote an entertaining piece about how to get Xboxes online without having to jump through the hoops that ICT puts in your path. Some “workarounds” were suggested and though Simon was (to quote him) “too much of a pussy” to recommend them to you, recommend them he did. _

_Simon was absolutely right in that both of his suggestions are against the Acceptable Use Policy of the network. _

His first suggestion was to muck about with MAC addresses. We call this “spoofing” and don’t like it very much. At best it is unhelpful when we’re debugging a network issue and at worst fraudulent. We also have a legal obligation, reinforced by our upstream internet provider (ja.net, the UK academic network) to be able to tie all traffic back to a known source. Deliberate concealment by spoofing is frowned upon and so we look out for it. ’Nuff said.

As for sticking a router on the network – we really don’t like that. Apart from our macho need to be in control of the active devices on the network, routers and suchlike almost by definition interfere with its operation. Worse, they can affect other people – perhaps even denying them connectivity (for example, they run a dhcp server). Managing networks well when you don’t control all the components is impossible, so we ask you not to plug in anything that is not a properly registered host.

However, of most interest to me was the impression given in the article that registering a device is hard. Is it? Harder than spoofing your MAC address? If it genuinely is, please let me know and I’ll try to do something about it. My team do respond to registration requests immediately, not that we get all that many (five last year, I think).

Simon is kind enough to say that Imperial Internet is one of the fastest around. We work hard to achieve this. For you. We like it to be used, for recreational as well as academic purposes. We only try to prevent illegal activities and actions which interfere with another user. The AUP is there because the network is a shared environment, so there needs to be an operating framework.

After all, without rules where would we be?

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Williams

Network Manager, ICT