<p>first of all, with the whole one port/student mentality in dorms, and assuming that i wont have wireless access, does anyone have any experience with connecting both an xbox and laptop to the network at the same time?</p>
<p>what i was thinking was to either buy a cheap desktop or build a dedicated fileserver type of system, and then share the connection with the xbox and laptop? how feasible would this be? it would be nice to have a place to dump all of my files while possibly running bittorrent in the background, but would sharing the connection be forbidden under the same type of rule that disallows routers and such?</p>
<p>A router is nothing more than a computer with a bunch of ethernet ports. Using a PC in its place would make the PC a router as well, so the rules against using a router would apply to it as well.</p>
<p>So just use a switch. It'll let you share the ethernet port without the full capabilities of a router.</p>
<p>
running bittorrent in the background
If you're doing this to download copyrighted files, I highly recommend against it. Rights holders (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) are always watching college IP adresses.</p>
<p>At least at my school, they loan you a hub for the year in the dorms so you can connect multiple devices to the single ethernet port a room has.</p>
<p>It's not clear what kind of device would work. There could be static addresses without a DHCP server (unlikely) so that just adding a switch wouldn't work. On Macs, it's pretty easy to create a wireless network off the Ethernet - as long as the other devices have wireless or are able to do networking off of Bluetooth or Firewire.</p>
<p>If they say only one end-user device, you might look into an A-B switch. That would meet their restrictions.</p>
<p>I'm surprised that they don't have WiFi though. How do folks use their iPod Touch devices?</p>
<p>this may or may not work. get a router. using your laptop's mac address spoof it unto the router. in this case the router gets read as your laptop. you may want to do the same with the xbox. the reason it may not work, is because if you have devices with the same mac address connected together you may get a conflict. but that's where your answer will lie.</p>
<p>the other answer will be of course to get a wireless router, spoof its mac address and password protect it so that only your xbox and laptop can get access to it. this assumes of course that your school doesn't have anything in place like cisco clean access. it'll probably be easier to catch the wireless router though.</p>
<p>there's probably a bunch of ways to do this. more information would be useful in coming up with a solution.</p>
<p>i just got my acceptance letter in the mail today, so there is still a long while until this would need to go into place lol. some of the dorms do have wireless access in common areas, but the steel/brick/concrete structure (so i was told) makes it very unreliable in the rooms</p>
<p>congrats. you'll definitely want an Ethernet connection, but don't worry too much about spreading it out between multiple devices. think of it like this: when you're playing games you most likely won't be using the internet on your computer (perhaps you may be downloading something, but downloads won't go anywhere and can be resumed after your done playing). likewise, when you're on your computer, you normally won't need the 360 online, unless you're getting updates or downloading games, which occur rather quickly anyways.</p>
<p>i'll tell you right now, just from working in an IT department, any school network with any kind of awareness in security and bandwidth will disallow routers of any sort. it sucks but that's something you just have to deal with.</p>
<p>
[quote]
How do folks use their iPod Touch devices?
[/quote]
Well, it's not like they're obligated to support anything, like sleepyman says about his college and online gaming. But I know that at my college, those iPod Touches are a huge pain. Everybody connects to the wireless network with them and uses up too many dynamic IP addresses. This is probably the exact reason why they don't want to allow more than one device per student.</p>
<p>sleepyman, how exactly is it that the school blocks your game consoles from getting internet access? does your school use clean access by any chance? does it block game servers? i'm curious. my school doesn't 'support' game consoles either but there are very simple ways to get the xbox 360 and ps3 online.</p>
<p>Hey BP sorry for the late response.
I don't know for sure, I'm sure my friend who is a CS major would know. I can tell you that they use bluesocket to regulate our internet from computers. Maybe there is a way to get around it, on the list of other computers connected to the network I have seen someone's 360 connected. But it just might be the box sending out signals so its "on" the network, might not be officially connected. No one I know with a 360 or PS3 can connect.</p>
<p>Even it they could connect though, they would be laggy as hell on our crappy wireless B 56kb/s network.</p>
<p>try to spoof your mac address. on the xbox 360 it's easily doable by going into advanced network settings. just input your computer's mac address. on the ps3 it may be a bit harder to do since you cant' do it. but what you can attempt is to spoof the mac address from the ps3 onto your computer. log into the school network. then once you're logged in, log in with the ps3.</p>
<p>surely enough if your school has wireless access, they have ethernet jacks on the wall. use that to connect to the network.</p>