When I am at the local community college, I use my laptop and turn on its wi-fi connection. I’m asked to “authenticate” myself (although any email address will do), and then the icon in the system tray shows with a yellow exclamation point that says “guest-no internet access.”
But I can, in fact, access the internet. I can go to web pages and read them or download stuff.
I cannot check or send emails using my email client. I also can’t update my accounts in Quicken. But isn’t getting on the internet (i.e., accessing web sites) actual “internet access”?
It seems to me it would be more accurate to say “limited internet access” or something.
I can understand the school limiting access… I just don’t get this definition. I just wanna understand. (That’s all I ever want to do…)
Typically, these types of systems will be set up so that you can access local network resources, but access to the public Internet will be blocked. At your community college, I would expect you to be able to access campus department web sites, check campus email, and access other campus network resources. I would also expect that access to, say, www.google.com would be blocked. Perhaps the above isn’t the way your campus has the guest wireless network set up, either intentionally or unintentionally.
From the perspective of a campus systems administrator, college network resources would usually be considered local network resources, not Internet resources.
A guest network that allows the Web but not other protocols isn’t unheard-of; that’s what we have here, too. But I’m not sure if that would be labeled “no Internet”.
This would be referred to as ‘firewalled access’ or similar; you have access to the outside, but not unfiltered access.
What ThelmaLou is likely describing is intranet-only (note spelling!) access, where you only have access to resources hosted on machines within the network run by the community college’s computer people. It uses the same technology as the public Internet, which could be described as a network of such intranets all sharing traffic, but (as you’ve seen) doesn’t always let you out into the world. An intranet can be as small as a building or as large as a country.
Windows has a Network Awareness Service that checks for “Internet Access” by trying a DNS lookup, and then a http connection directly to a Microsoft server. If it cannot do so, the network connection icon switches to “No Internet Access”. It may not be aware of any proxys, or your proxy access may not be allowed at that point. You can actually get to the internet because the local network has a proxy that intercepts http requests and makes the connection for you (probably using browser autoconfiguration or a transparent proxy). You may or may not be required to authenticate to get through the proxy.
UCLA has this for the benefit of visitors that happen to be on site with their notebooks and need to access the Web for whatever reason. It works pretty much the same way in that you can’t use anything that requires a secure client, like Microsoft Outlook. My understanding is that the objective is to restrict access to campus resources such as online journals, campus-related online communities, etc., but allow general web access to visitors. In the case of online journals, I’m sure that licensing provisions play a part here; it’s probably cheaper for the library to provide the access if it can assure the vendor that it’s restricted to students and faculty.
I can’t speak as an authority on this. But my WAG is that barring all access to https: pages is the simplest way of guarding your own institutional or licensed data from unauthorized access. To allow guest access to external secure sites might make it considerably more difficult to secure your own sites.