Setting up personal lan over college network

[karryt]

Ok, I don't know if my title makes much sense, but this is what I'm want to do:
I'm dorming on campus now, and am connected to our campus-wide network. I want to set up a little group within our network for my friends and I. I've never been in this kind of environment and am very unfamiliar of how to do this securely. I've only worked with self-contained networks at home. We will have machines running win9x and I run win2k pro. Can anyone give me an idea of what has to be done to get our workgroup running securely (without worries of others getting into our computers)? If you need more info, ask and I'll try to explain more.

thanks,
jeff

 

[Scarpozzi]

All you have to do is setup a workgroup and just tell all your friends to set themselves up in the same workgroup.... Just go into your network settings and under the identification tab you can set your computer name, workgroup, and description. Just make sure you're running NetBEUI, Client for Microsoft Networks, and TCP/IP....and you'll be set for Microsoft File and Print Sharing(as long as you enable it). That's about the extent of what you can do unless you have REAL IP addresses. The university I used to work for put all the dorms on their own subnet and we actually only used 7 ip addresses for the whole dorm population on campus. Great for Admin purposes as IP addresses are getting scarce, but sucks for the students because it impairs mapping UDP ports to the individual computers.... Or makes it so you have to map UDP ports and NAT to be able to use all the nifty programs that people like to use like FTP and AIM Talk(at least talking externally didn't work...duh). But I hope that helps you out...

 

[karryt]

Thanks Scarpozzi, I think I can handle the setting up everything, but are there some things that I can do to make sure only people I want can access our workgroup?

 

[CTR]

Anybody who knows your workgroup name can be in your workgroup. But you can put passwords on your shared resources, so that is somewhat secure. Or you could use the existing network to do a VPN, but you will probably need some hardware to do it.

Give the LAN admin $100 and see if he'll put all of you on your own VLAN.

 

[crazydave]

Check out this web site: http://cable-dsl.home.att.net/. It's actually a website for information on cable/dsl setup, sharing, etc. but it also has some very good resources on securing your network and internet connection. You might especially want to check out the section on setting Scope ID (it's on the Netbios page--you'll have to scroll down a bit to find it)--and I think as long as all the computers on your "private" network have the same Scope ID, you can see each other, but no one else will be able to see you. That and adding passwords to all your shared resources should make it a bit more secure. Hope that helps!

 

[fergiboy]

You could also use a router which would be the expensive but most secure method.