Network administrators of Duke University’s WiFi is pretty sure it’s iPhone that’s knocking off the WLAN connection, which is open to the public. Eighteen thousand Mac requests per second (about 10Mbps) is outstripping the network’s capacity and it’s not even August yet.
Because of the time of year for us, it’s not a severe problem,” says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke’s Office of Information Technology. “But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It’s a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20-30 access points signaling they’re down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating.”
The main problem is that the requests are for an invalid address. When no answer comes Apple’s revolutionary “Jesus” phone just keeps on asking. Talking about persistence in praying. The network flooding seem to come from one device or two. The administrators think the router is not to blame and points squarely at iPhone but one student (‘js.’) is not so sure: “This isn’t the first time there’s a problem between a Cisco router and a specific device. For example, I know of cases where autonegotiation just cannot be allowed on 10/100/1000 Ethernet between some Cisco routers and Sun Fire series servers.”
[via networkworld]
July 20th, 2007 at 4:41 am
[...] Network Bombarded by iPhone Users - PMP Today PMP TodayWiFi Network Bombarded by iPhone Users PMP Today, CA - 2 hours ago Network administrators of Duke [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 8:21 am
NetworkWorld.com: Duke IT staff & their Cisco network confused by Apple iPhones; trade rags take bait
Let me see if I can wrap my head around this — some bored students figured out what the MAC address range is on the iPhones, and they styled an attack using a couple of Linux machines hidden somewhere on campus to masquerade as Apple ‘troublemakers’, and are sniggering at the resulting buffoonery created between the Duke ‘network admins’ and the press.
Hello!?!??!? If these are actually the people responsible for Duke’s network, they would have better communication skills — what they are saying is happening is less unlikely than impossible (unless the iPhone and Cisco’s routers’ SuperPowers are being boosted by the Earth’s yellow sun and are no longer hindered by their original design limitations).
Why has this been going on for several days and yet no one has reported the same issue on another network?
It’s because: It’s not happening on Duke’s network, either. It’s a hack. A scam. A ruse.
By some students who can probably be identified by a duct-taped WiFi canon made from a couple of Pringles cans protruding from their backpacks.
The ‘reporter’ should be ashamed for not doing his homework.