I'm going to Ohio U next year and have heard stories of the networks being open and a simple port scan revealing all the devices connected which is far cool to me. I figure the only solution is to put everything on a private LAN. Would it make more sense to buy a wired/wireless router, or to get a switch and a wireless repeater?
If you put a router between your network and the school's network then no one will be able to access your network but you will still be able to access the schools, as well as the internet.
Well, yeah. I've never really had to deal with network stuff from a college before so I was just checking to see what the best option would be!
I have a similar setup with a PFsense box at home. My dad wants control over his half of things, and also over the internet filter. But I wanted to try PFsense and some other network things, like network boot. So I set up PFsense and just told the WAN interface to use my dad's router as an "Upstream Gateway". Works like a charm after that. If you run into issues, try disabling IPv6 on the WAN, that solved the problem for me.
Let me know if I can be of assistance! :)
Keep us up to date on this. I have been looking into doing it when I go back to school.