I was reminded of this recently while talking to a friend and thought I'd tell the tale of when I got banned from the Engineering lab at FIU. Unfairly of course!
I was a Freshman, and this was back in 1995. The EIC lab was the Engineering department's pride and joy; it was basically a lab of 486DX2/66 computers with 16MB of RAM (still a decent machine in 1995) on 10base-2 (coax) ethernet.
The subnet ran both IPX (Novell NetWare) and IP on the same wire, but the vast majority of lab stations did not have IP addresses. In order to get out to the net, you had to use LAT to connect to one of the VAX systems on campus, SERVAX or SERVMS. Oddly enough, though, all the systems had Trumpet Winsock and Netscape installed under Windows, they just didn't have IP addresses set.
I already knew quite a bit about IP networking and Winsock, so of course whenever I was in the lab I'd sneakily grab an unused IP address and happily browse the web while everyone else was still stuck using terminal sessions to the VAX. Luckily, nobody seemed to notice or care.
Until I typoed my favorite IP address. Yep, I was using the same one for a while, but this time I typoed and used the same IP as the print server in the lab. Oops. Printing was down. The lab manager quickly noticed the frosh running Netscape and I was fried. I pleaded my case, apologizing and admitting that I had been using an unused IP address and had typoed that day, but they were merciless.
Banned from the lab for two semesters!
The ironic part of this story is that less than a year later I was hired by the CS department, which eventually took over most of the building. I was one of the student employees who dismantled the lab I had been banned from. I pulled out that thinnet with glee!
Any other fellow geeks have war stories from exploring networks and systems in their college days? :)
rm -rf /*
I never did much in college; about the closest I got to circumventing the system was at the beginning of each year when students had to register MAC addresses on an Intranet page that was only accessible from a lab computer or another student's on-campus box. The public user storage/webhost machine was available via SSH from the outside world so I logged in and used Lynx to register my network card so that it would be already functional when I got to campus. About the only useful thing I ever used that browser for.
High school was a bit more fun though, because there was only one admin for the whole campus and for a while I actually worked for him. Too many little things to list but we had a proxy server and relatively strict policies so there was plenty of opportunity for mischief. We did have some rather bizarre server names there... iluvatar for instance.