The CIS Laptop Bar

Summary
The FIU School of Computing and Information Sciences has set up laptop bars in each academic lab (JCCL, ExLab, and the Graduate Lab) that allow students without wireless network cards to connect their laptop computers to the CIS network. Note that if you have a wireless network card, you should visit our wireless support page for instructions on how to register your wireless network card.

Usage of the laptop bar requires the following:

• A laptop/notebook computer with a 10 or 10/100Mbit ethernet interface.
• An operating system that supports DHCP (Windows, Linux, MacOS all do)
• A web browser that supports SSL (Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, etc.)

To connect to the CIS network, simply configure your laptop's network card to obtain an IP address automatically with DHCP, then plug one of the cable drops at the laptop bar into your computer.

At this point, your computer will obtain an address. You must then attempt to visit any website (for instance, http://www.google.com). The CIS Sentry Authentication System will present you with a login page. Log in with your FIU-CIS or JCCL UNIX account username and password. When the authentication process is complete, you will be automatically redirected to the web page you specified.

Miscellaneous Notes 

If you are running any type of firewall software on your computer, you must allow ICMP PING packets through the firewall in both directions. This is because the authentication server uses PING to determine if you are still connected to the network. If your laptop doesn't respond to ping packets, your connection will time out after five minutes. Reconnecting is as simple as browsing a website and reauthenticating.

We recommend that you set your laptop's ethernet interface to auto-negotiate. If you force it to a certain speed, the connection may not work.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at request@cis.fiu.edu or speak to Lab Support Staff in ECS 241 or ECS 265.