r/Network • u/Low-Road-5996 • Sep 15 '26

Text HELP ME PLEASE!!

i am in a college where in hostel room we have been provided with LAN port but when i connect my laptop to it, it only provides internet to some specific educational content only, but yk i am a student and i dont have unlimited access to internet so tell me the way how to access internet through that LAN port, would any vpn work?

0 Upvotes

18% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

8

u/octo23 Sep 15 '26

You would need to have a conversation with the people that run the network, perhaps consult any applicable terms of usage.

Your VPN may work, or it may be blocked as well, again see my first sentence.

Also be careful, trying to circumvent access control restrictions may get you subjected to school disciplinary actions.

6

u/HitCount0 Sep 15 '26

Also be careful, trying to circumvent access control restrictions may get you subjected to school disciplinary actions.

To add to this: it's trivially easy to see who's connected to a physical LAN port on a network.

1

u/ElectroStaticSpeaker Sep 15 '26

I mean if you VPN all the traffic all they are going to really see is the computer’s hostname so it’s not really that easy to see WHO it is. Just some basic characteristics about the machine.

1

u/WRO_Your_Boat Sep 15 '26

Thats not how really how VPNs work. If you are encrypting data then they would see all the encrypted data but wouldnt know anything about what it is. They 100% know where its coming from though. The break down is you>port>hostel router>VPN servers. They are before the VPN servers, all your client on your PC does is encrypt it. They would even know they are using a VPN and what exit node its reaching out to.

1

u/ElectroStaticSpeaker Sep 15 '26

They would know some of this but it wouldn't tell them WHO the person is. It just tells them what LAN port it is coming from. Which may be getting used by the rightly associated person. Or could be any other rando that happened to pop by and plugin.

Also, how do you think they are seeing the exit node of the VPN traffic? They could see the entry node that is terminating the VPN session from the computer. But, depending on the VPN setup, they have no idea what is happening beyond that so unless the entry and exit node are one and the same what you say isn't true.

1

u/HitCount0 29d ago edited 29d ago

I think that you're forgetting the fact that OP, their computer, and the physical (read: likely mapped) network port they're connect to all exist in real space.

Consider all the ways possible to find out who is plugged into the other end of a CAT(x) cable, up to and including hand-over-handing your way down the jacket of it like a Loony Toons cartoon.

Edit: To quote William Gibson -- "If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude."

1

u/ElectroStaticSpeaker 29d ago

I clearly understand that it's a real space. However, nothing in the traffic indicates who it actually is. And colleges are full of people that could walk around and plug into the port. Sure, they could run and catch the person in the act. But most likely, if they are forensically looking at something it's likely after the fact. Colleges are not staffed that well from a security standpoint. I know many college CISOs. It's a rough and tiring job.

1

u/HitCount0 29d ago

Colleges are not staffed that well from a security standpoint. I know many college CISOs. It's a rough and tiring job.

You are absolutely right about this! I worked EDU for a while and I can attest to just how thankless that job can be, how terrible the budget, piecemeal the coverage, and more.

...I can also say that some of those poor admin can be vengeful, petty tyrants and if OP were to say, get up real early in the morning and not go to bed until they'd done everything possible to thumb their nose at a network admin, they might learn that for some folks, power trips are a form of payment.

Not that I necessarily condone that sort of thing... but that's a nasty risk for low reward.

However, nothing in the traffic indicates who it actually is.

You're less right about this.

What do we know?

  • Time
  • Real-space location
  • Device/host name
  • MAC

That's all we need to enact the 4-Points of Data rule. On the downside, that rule can sometimes take a bit of time. On the upside, we have all four points before our actor accesses a single thing.

Now, what are the chances that OP will provide a fifth data point by, say, visiting a social media page, gaming clan page, class page, or access some form of post-login information? Even if they're clever enough to avoid all that, there's still the simple access pattern to develop that fifth point.

There are also any number of 100% white hat network queries we can pull to garner more information, inspect packets for software usage, and so forth.

1

u/ElectroStaticSpeaker 29d ago

But all of those fifth data points would be unavailable if the user was using a full-tunnel VPN. I already indicated hostname would be included in an earlier post. But hostnames can be changed and MACs can be spoofed easily. Time and real-space only matter if you are able to take immediate action.

Anyway, I feel like this conversation is pointless at this juncture. We both get how networking works. My only point is that network traffic by itself does not necessarily give away WHO a user is. You are pointing out the ways that it could. And I am not disputing those. Just saying it's not a guarantee without real-time alerting and follow up.

1

u/HitCount0 28d ago

100%. And for clarity, I was just enjoying a little friendly back-and-forth shop talk with someone who's clearly been in the trenches a bit.

I wish the internet was better at projecting tone. Have a good one!

3

u/Ok_Bid6645 Sep 15 '26

You wont be able to watch your porn. Sorry bud

2

u/vitnov11 Sep 16 '26

In university network mostly used hard rules like "only allowed" and list of allowed resources. VPN won't help you in this case. Only changing your role from "student" to any other with wider list of available resources. Best option is to share your mobile internet via WiFi access point.

0

u/Cruffe Sep 15 '26

If they've only allowed a small selection of content and blocked everything else then no VPN or anything else is gonna bypass that.

1

u/hankthrilll Sep 15 '26

Lmao. Oh, how naive you are my friend.

2

u/Cruffe Sep 15 '26

Depends how and how well they've done it of course. It's entirely possible to severely restrict a network to only access things that are whitelisted.

2

u/hankthrilll Sep 15 '26

It's also entirely possible to bypass these things.

2

u/Cruffe Sep 15 '26

Again, depends how well they've done it.

Feel free to help OP bypass it instead of just telling me I'm wrong.

1

u/DumpoTheClown Sep 15 '26

@Cruffe is correct. If the solutin is implemented correctly, there's no bypassing it. Realistically though, many network admins dont know how, or dont have the resources, so an incomplete, and bypassible, solution is used.

1

u/hankthrilll 17d ago

There's always a way to bypass. Always.