Assorted Afflatuses

Of all the horrible staples of college life, one stands out in my mind as the most obnoxious. Some might focus their attention on the dunderheaded folks who disrupt everyone's sleep by holding loud conversations about meaningless jibber-jabber at 4 AM. Others might (quite erroneously, in my opinion) bemoan the insipidity of the muffins. But neither of those two problems have any relevance or weight when compared to the Internet access here at Bates.

I doubt there exists another system even a tenth as convoluted as the system deployed on the Bates campus. It took me no less than three hours to connect my laptop to the Internet for the first time. Three hours! What is more, had it not been for the serendipitous presence and wonderful benevolence of someone a floor down from me, the process might have taken even longer.

For, to correctly authenticate with the network, I needed to install a security certificate on my computer. But, to obtain the certificate, I needed an Internet connection. It took a second computer, with a functioning Internet connection, to put my computer online. Insanity.

Coercing the software to cooperate, however, is only the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. First, there is the software itself. The Cisco Clean Access Agent, companion software product to the infamous Cisco NAC Appliance, is, at least on the Macintosh, poorly-written, dysfunctional and mildly parasitic. When it fails to do a mediocre job connecting me to the Internet, the Clean Access Agent throws caution to the wind, causing kernel panics, forcing restarts, and crashing iTunes. The software also seems to have trouble realizing it has not successfully connected me to the Internet on some occasions. In the five weeks I have been using the software, I have uninstalled and reinstalled it at least four dozen times because it cannot correctly determine the status of my connection.

Then there is the quality of the Internet access itself. On most days it makes me dream of dial-up. My iPhone, connected to the Internet via molasses-like EDGE and operating on a relatively pokey 600 MHz ARM processor, can usually load pages faster than my dual-core laptop connected to the college network. I suspect the problem is twofold. On the one hand, the college needs to realize that, what with YouTube, iTunes and easy videoconferencing, students use far more bandwidth than the college has. Time to upgrade to a zippier connection, as it were. On the other, the software on the network's routers do an awful job of traffic shaping. I have little doubt that some tiny, self-serving group of people suck up 90 percent of the college's bandwidth downloading reruns of Baywatch after classes end at four.

As if the lamentable software, awful connection quality and convoluted installation procedure were not enough, however, I also cannot connect my iPhone to the campus WiFi network. Despite the fact that no third-party software can be installed on the iPhone now, and the fact that Apple would never be sufficiently insane to allow third-parties access to the kind of low-level APIs an iPhone Clean Access Client would need, the college categorically refuses to allow the iPhone onto the NAC Appliance's mythical "white list." Without any authorization, the phone has no Internet access via WiFi. I particularly like the laconic response the IT department sent in response to my email inquiring into the subject of iPhone WiFi access:

I cannot decide whether the "NO" was intended to be in all caps. Regardless, I would have appreciated the "why" behind the senseless policy.

To me, the fact I cannot connect my device to the network is a breach of good morals. It is as if the college were issuing a ban on filling pitchers of a certain shape with the dormitory tap water. I pay a share of the costs associated with the Internet connection, network hardware and its upkeep, thus I should be permitted to use the connection on any device, so long as it does not harm the group. I hardly see my accessing email, browsing maps of Berlin or reading the New York Times on my phone with the help of the campus WiFi network as a violation of that implicit contract.

I joined the Facebook group, Clean Access is the Bane of My Existence, though, with only 13 members as of now, I doubt it will have much of an impact in the near-term. I almost feel as if more direct, outspoken action is necessary to deal with this most troublesome of problems.