Getting LAN info

In our college we have a big LAN system. There are 3 campus, which have their own Labs . Apart from these there are 2 hostels. The system Administrator has given us a IP address .In Internet Explorer properties we give this IP as proxy on port 80 and access net. There is time limit for net access -from evening 8 to morning 7 only.
1. But I am sure that there are some IP's where net comes 24hrs.., is there any way to get those IP's ?
2. Say I got an IP which has net access for 24hrs, how do I hide my computer in the network, so that the network admin will not be able to trace me ? In Windows XP there is option to add more that one IP address, will this help ?
3. whenever I ping any host name it shows host not reachable, but when I ping IP address it pings. Probably I guess it doesn't ping any outside IP's(outside our network).If this is the case, why is it so ? Is the DNS not configured ? Is there any solution to this ?

Lucky,

There is nothing like trying to figure a way around certain restrictions put by the system administrator and bypassing them completly under his nose!

The role of a proxy is to limit Internet access on the internal workstations, creating a fully controlled environment in order to make sure no abuse will take place.

Without knowning the exact setup of your college network, it would be hard to give you a straight answer.

If your sys admin is good at what he does, then it's most likely he has pactched up most, if not all, possible holes to avoid users like yourself from getting their hands dirty [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

If all traffic that goes through the proxy is logged, then there is no way of accessing the Internet without him knowing as most, if not all proxies provide logging facilites which aim to help the adminsitrator see where everyone is going on the Internet.

It could be possible that certain machines have "full" or "unlimited" access, and you could use their IP if you knew it, but at the same time, that IP would have to fall within the same logical network you are in, otherwise you will have routing problems, and secondly, the particular IP must be free in order for you to use it. This means the PC with this IP must be switched off or have its network cable unpluged.

If your setup involves more complex configurations, such as authentication based access and VLANs, then it becomes even more hard to achive what you want!

A simple 'traceroute' will show you the path the packet takes in order to reach a certain host on the Internet, and this information is valueble when trying to bypass security. Your admin though might have ICMP replies turned off at the firewall or routers, so you might not get all the information you need.

The key to get what you want done is to fully understand and know how the network is setup and then start looking for your small holes to bypass certain restrictions.

Let us know how you go!

Good luck .... and try to keep out of trouble! [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Cheers,

hi Chris,
We are not using VLAN's . I'll be telling you more details about the network. But one thing I can tell is our Network Admin is NOT good at what he does [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Thanks !
Lucky.

You should find out whether you get your IP dynamically assigned through DHCP, and if the '24 hr' IPs are static ips etc. Grabbing one of those IP's may not be very simple given that the admin is specifically trying to time limit your access (most firewalls let you set up a rule such as

SOURCE - CampusLAN
DESTINATION - Any
PROTOCOL - HTTP
ACTION - Allow
TIME - 8PM-7AM

(sorry that rule didn't format properly horizontally like I wanted it to so its a bit hard to read)

Where CampusLAN will include a range of IP's that he wants time limited. So the other IPs would have no time limit. Do remember that DHCP can be used to assign an IP address based on the MAC address (in other words your mac address always gets the same IP) this can complicate the issue further.

Perhaps a better solution would be to look for some outbound access which is allowed without time limit and leverage it for surfing ? Or better yet.. get friendly with one of the '24 hr IP' people and get them to act as your proxy

Hehe I dont know if this helped in making things clearer for you, but the details you gave are a bit murky.


Sahir.