Project Background

Lehigh University has approximately 6,000 students (4200 undergraduate and 1800 graduate), with over 3,000 students living in on-campus residences.Of the students living on-campus nearly 95% have computers that they bring with them to Lehigh.

While the vast majority of these students have desktop computers the trend in recent years has seen an increase in the number of students bringing laptop PCs to campus.The great advantage of a laptop is the portability it affords a user, but in today’s world having a connection to the network and the Internet is one of the main reasons for having a computer.Wired network connections negate the portability advantage laptops have because students can’t leave their rooms without losing their network connections. Wireless connections are a natural way to extend the capabilities of the laptop.Another important piece of background information was the wider acceptance of the 802.11b wireless networking standard and its ease of implementation. Lehigh’s first steps were to look at two specific areas to utilize wireless on campus. The first area provided wireless connectivity to locations that are heavily used and had limited or no network connectivity.The second area provided flexible classroom space using laptops and wireless connections for faculty and student experimentation.

The initial project funding was provided by a parent of one of our student residential networking consultants who was so impressed with the work his son was doing that he donated seed money to get Lehigh’s wireless project off the ground. The first areas targeted were the Lehigh Libraries, wireless classrooms, courtyards and common lounge areas.Along with this plan, it was decided to have a year long pilot group of students with laptops and wireless cards to determine how they would use the wireless network as well as to make suggestions for possible expansion of our wireless coverage points.

Current Wireless Implementation

Lehigh decided to standardized on Cisco hardware for both access points and PC cards. Lehigh is currently using Cisco’sAironet 340 and 350 Access points and Cisco Aironet 340 and 350 client adapters for Information Resources laptops.The students in our test group used wireless access cards including Lucent WaveLAN, Dell TrueMobile, Linksys, 3Com Airconnect and Apple Airport.All of these cards worked fine with the Cisco Access points.

The first wireless locations made available were the two Lehigh libraries with wireless laptops available for sign out from the circulation desk; students are also allowed to bring in their own laptops with wireless cards (available for purchase in the bookstore).The project then expanded to the lounge areas around campus as well as equipping one 30-station classroom with wireless laptops that are distributed at the start of class.This classroom was used extensively by our first year engineering course and was very well received by both faculty and students in the class.

Problems Encountered

Many of the problems encountered have dealt specifically with the current limitations of laptop computers. The limited battery life of the laptops restricts usage; when signing out loaner laptops in the library, laptops need to be recharged fully to make sure that they have maximum battery life.Another laptop problem has been setting up the loaner and classroom room laptops to use our public site PC image. This makes the laptops work like a public site computer, which means that email is setup at login as well as other software and printer initializations. The problem with this is making sure the laptops are the exact same hardware configuration and then developing an image for that configuration.There is also the issue of maintaining new images when new laptops are purchased.Another interesting problem that people don’t initially think of when using a wireless laptop is the screen quality of laptops when used outdoors.It is very trendy to think of students using their laptops outdoors under a tree or in an Adirondack chair on the school’s commons but in reality laptops screens are very difficult to see outside during the day, even in the shade.

Student Pilot Group

In order to evaluate how useful wireless would be to the student body, Information Resources recruited 20 students to serve as wireless testers for the 2000-2001 academic year.Information Resources supplied a wireless card to each tester for use in his or her laptops.The students in turn agreed to provide feedback about use, problems with, and opinions about wireless computing.The following summarizes the feedback from the students’ monthly reports.

1.What do students use wireless access for?

The surveys indicated that the overwhelming use of wireless network access was for Internet applications (web browsing and e-mail).Basically, the testers used their wireless laptops to perform the same tasks for which they used their desktop PCs.Some testers said they used their wireless laptops to work on group projects that required network access.They reported that it was beneficial to them to be able to have network access is a non-traditional area such as a lounge where the group would work.

2.Where do students want wireless access next?

Individual students tended to list places that they frequented most; the lounge areas of their residential dorms and buildings where they had classes (e.g., business majors wanted Rauch Business Center).Areas that most students frequent (e.g., Ulrich Student Center and libraries) were high on every students list for wireless access. Contrary to what was expected, the University dinning halls were only listed by a few students as a place they wanted wireless access next.In discussions held with the pilot group several of them stated that being able to surf the web while eating lunch was a “neat” idea, but they viewed the dinning halls as a place they use to get away from school work and computers.

3.What problems were encountered with setting up a wireless laptop?

The majority of the wireless testers reported success in setting up their personal laptops for wireless access.The University supplied the wireless adapters and instructions and nearly all students were able to set up their laptops on their own.Although the majority of the testers would be classified as being very computer literate there were several who only had average computer skills who still managed to set up their own laptops unassisted. Most problems reported by students dealt with the inconsistency of wireless access.While the network access speed was reported as being good (most likely because of the few wireless users) connections sometimes were hard to establish.Areas that were difficult to establish and maintain a wireless connection were in the library (in between the stacks of books) and in buildings with a lot of stone/concrete walls.

4.What do students think about extending wireless access to the classroom?

Overall most of the testers thought that wireless access in the classroom would be a good thing.They didn’t have any suggestions about what its utilization.Most envisioned it being used as an alternative to the classroom projector or individual desktop PCs in a lab setting. Several students pointed out that wireless access in a classroom could be a distraction.Students could end up spending time surfing the web instead of paying attention to the instructor.

Wireless Security Issues

As Lehigh began to roll out its wireless project the first area that needed to be addressed was to change Lehigh’s acceptable use policy.Lehigh added that it had the rights to the air space on-campus and that any wireless access point placed on campus needed approval by Information Resources.The first use of this policy occurred when a student placed a wireless access point running a dhcp server in one of the administrative offices, which promptly took down a part of the network.Information Resources also faced the realization that its wired and wireless network needed better security.A number of new programs appeared that made it easy for a determined hacker to tap into our networks and snoop passwords. Various sniffer-type programs (with plug-in filters) were available which could scan network traffic for passwords and confidential information compromising system security.

To solve this problem Lehigh decided to secure its network through the elimination of all clear-text passwords and confidential information on the network via the implementation of high-level encryption algorithms and other security measures.

The following controls are now in use to secure our networks:

Passwords- primary account for all users utilizes Kerberos (AFS) authentication.
Local Area Networks - passwords required for all LAN access; Novell passwords synchronized with AFS passwords.
Centralized Port Control (Residential Networks) - allows abusive or compromised systems to be removed from the network.
Electronic Mail - for incoming mail access, non-secure IMAP and POP replaced with 128-bit SSL IMAP and POP.
Terminal Emulation - telnet replaced with SSH (Secure Shell) on primary systems.
File Transfers - ftp replaced with SSH (Secure Shell) on primary systems.
Web Publishing - ftp and http publishing replaced with https.
Web Security - pages with password authentication moving from http to https.
Administrative Systems - behind firewall; SQLnet being replaced with secure SQLnet.
Legacy Systems - behind firewall; moving to restrict access to VPN connections.

Future Security Implementations:

Portal - secure single sign-on access to electronic mail, course pages, and access to personal information on administrative systems.
Certificate Authority - individuals will be issued digital certificates for use as digital signatures and for public-key encryption of secure electronic mail.
Centralized Port Control (Administrative Networks) - will allow abusive or compromised systems to be removed from the network.
Wireless Security - utilize EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) to authenticate through a RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) server and then utilize dynamic, session-based WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy) encryption keys for secure communications. This provides a higher level of security than does WEP alone.

Issues and Problems with Implementation:

Software Availability - multi-platform availability of software, especially for the Macintosh, has been an issue.
Software Stability - the stability and feature set of available software has been an issue. VPN and other tunneling-type software can cause system instability.
Major change for clients, which needed to be staged over a period of six months.

Future Plans

The next phase of the project will encompass putting wireless access in common areas within the student dorms.Tentatively, Information Resources has selected the common areas within two residential living units for wireless expansion.When wireless was first conceived, the idea of installing wireless access in the study areas within each dorm was not high on the list of possible locations.However, feedback from the students pointed out that these were areas where they wanted wireless access.Their rationale was that there are many times that they need to do work but cannot do it from their rooms because their roommates are is sleeping or listening to loud music.They wanted to have the ability to work outside of their rooms without necessarily leaving the building.Also the study areas afford a great deal more room to work than a dorm room.They stressed that being able to work collaboratively on projects with other students in the study areas is a major plus for wireless connections.

Information Resources also intends to update the wireless coverage in buildings that already have it to include the entire building.There is a presumption that at this point there will be sufficient interests in wireless networking that we will need to go back and completely cover buildings because of increased demand.The first two areas will be to provide classroom coverage in two heavily used academic buildings; Rauch Business Center and Maginnes Hall.

Wireless Beyond 2001

Beyond 2001 Lehigh will be looking into the next wave of wireless protocols such as the 802.11a standard which has speeds up to 54 mbs. Lehigh has also been experimenting with using PDAs with wireless cards and foresees these becoming more popular over the next few years.

Also, the new residence halls are being planned with both wired and wireless connections.