Can i "mask" my real ip and use a different one??

Another thing is that the college may have your dorm on 10mbps devices. Which my hamper performance.

Well, I would have to agree with Scraig84. Another point I would like to make is bandwidth limiting software can be smart or not so smart depending on what options you get with it. I.E., Checkpoints Floodgate add on can either limit by IP address or by network, or by interface that the traffic is coming in on. So no matter how you look at it you can't get around it probably. We set up Penn State and we did it by interface. One interface from the firewall goes to dorm internet traffic and another goes for the server traffic. Anything going to the internet is limited to 45K and everything else is max 100Mbit, the internet backbone is 45Mbit.

You can't just change addresses.  However, there is one possibility and it only works if everything is configured correctly.  Assuming they only bandwidth limit internet traffic and not campus traffic, there is a proxy server on campus that is in the non-limited range, and you can access that proxy server, your better off setting your applications to proxy to get the performance boost.

I know the above sounds like a lot of "if's".  But actually if I were running a dorm based network I would traffic shape direct traffic to almost nothing and then setup a good squid server that is available and gets full bandwidth.  The reason being that it would seriously encourage proxy use and since 80%+ of the traffic is probably hitting the same pages on the internet, it's a big help to proxy and the more users that use the same proxy the better cache hit ratio.

That IS an awful lot of "ifs".  Proxies can be good, they can also be very bad.  I think it is awfully presumptuous to say how one would design a network without knowing the requirements, the layout, existing policies, and the amount of money available.  Sounds like shooting a gun in the dark and not even knowing if you're in the right room.

Also, in all my years I have yet to ever see a proxy cache-hit report that even approaches 80%.  I think 40% is an outstanding achievement.

Sorry - not trying to pick on you!  However, if there's one thing that really drives me up a wall is the constant "one size fits all" mentality that runs rampant through the world's technical population.

One thing that hits me is the caches, that cache too much the incompleted loads, or old ones.       :(

> Can i "mask" my real ip and use a different one??

Ans, yeah, but won't help you any, look elsewhere.

You might better define just what it is you want to do, list what you have to work with, and ask for suggestions.

For internet, it just may be that hanging up phone to parents asking for money,,, then plugging into a local free ISP might do something for you, since likely most of your speed problem is more relevant to competing with other students for bandwidth than anything else.

Ans2> Find out who is NetAdmin. Take out on Friday night, buy a round or two. Now while all smile, ask for suggestion. There are other workaround alternatives, in one closet or another... but not my idea, let it be that of another closer to the scene

scraig84:

I think you were very confused by my post.  I in no way suggested a "one size fits all" approach.  I was speaking of a specific set of circumstances: dorm traffic on a network at an educational institution which prefers "lab/classroom" traffic and the bandwidth is shared.  

Most college situations are seeking to give students access in their dorms while keeping dorm traffic at a minimum of overall utilization.  Certainly you don't eliminate all issues with a proxy and your point about cache hits not being extremely high is somewhat valid, but if you get only a 25% hit ratio, the bandwidth savings are significant.  I can tell you that I've worked with quite a few educational institution and bandwidth utilization on most of these networks show significant peaks at times when "labs" are not open.  As such, it can be inferred that much of the traffic is "dorm" related traffic.  If that is not the case for a given network, then by all means the points I made are not correct.  It has been my experience, however, that that assessment is quite accurate for educational campus situations.

More info:

The campus computers run at 100mbps whereas the dorm connection is 10mbps.  I know that we have some different "Network ID's", mine is 4.17.xxx.xxx, the campus is 192.168.xxx.xxx.  The internet connection here at school is 3 T1's on a Gigabit Fiber optic network.

THIS IS MY QUESTION:

Can I ENTER my gateway/ip/dns server info MANUALLY using the information that I get from one of the PCs on campus? or is it the PHYSICAL network connection that is inhibiting the speeds?

Thanks,
Josh

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