NIT Trichy Local Area Network

Here’s a network map of NITT I prepared myself. I was long wishing to know the campus network in detail and so today I finally took the job to create it myself. Using the only tool I had for network scanning – NMAP (or “network mapper”) I was able to extract some of the basic information about the servers of my college along with their IP addresses, DNS names and their Operating System. I even got their MAC addresses and open ports, a great tool nmap is indeed!
To start with, unlike other colleges in the country, my college doesn’t provide NET Access in the computer labs except 1 which has just 99 systems. The Big OCTAGON or the Central Computing Center with lots of labs and workstations, has no net access for common students. Fortunately, Delta Force Members are allowed to access internet from one of the labs of Octagon called “Sun Lab”, named after Sun Microsystems , whose one of the employees and also the alumni of NITT donated 3 Sun Workstations and a number of Sun Terminals connected with those workstations forming a cluster. Although none of those terminal are currently online but there are around 6-7 computers running Linux and also including one Apple Mac, reserved only for Delta Members.

So coming back to the college LAN, the OCTAGON has got a pretty cool server room which centrally has all the servers of the campus which are connected to the LAN. The OCTAGON is provided an 8 Gbps internet access through the Software Technology Park based in Hyderabad. As per my knowledge, there are 7 servers which have direct internet access through the octagon. These includes the Webmail (The Mail Server of NITT), NITT ( The Server in which NITT Website is hosted), Pragyan (The server reserved for hosting Pragyan and Festember Events website), TP (Training and Placement), ConnectNIT ( A project of connecting all the NITs in the country in a special network and enabling collaborative projects and events) and RECAL (stands for “Regional Engineering College Alumni”, the server which host its website). Beside these there is one more server with IP 10.0.0.11 which doesn’t host anything but is used as a Proxy Server for accessing internet for those who have access, which includes Delta Members and Spider Members and may be others who need.

Delta has access to internet through 3 servers namely – NITT, Pragyan and 10.0.0.11. However only Core Members (that includes me) have access to NITT, which is always online. NITT and Pragyan comes under the direct control of Delta as they are responsible for the NITT Mail Website and Pragyan Website. Besides these Delta also hosts other servers (or actually computers turned servers) which are based on a local subnet of delta. They are used for some services like Codelabs (Programmer’s Corner of Delta), Dalal Street (An online stock exchange game hosted every year on Pragyan), GLUG-T( GNU Linux Users Group of Trichy of which I am a member too), and other multipurpose computers. In reality each of the computer delta owns can be instantly turned into a makeshift server and can host anything from Pragyan to Festember website to a heavy online application like Dalal Street. Delta provides most of the LAN Services to the students of NITT including a compendium of E-Books and Cool Softwares, besides providing access to Wikipedia, Times of India, Topcoder and SPOJ ( We are working on it ). Also some big projects are going inside Delta right now including a cool new template for the NITT Website and an iDelta portal similar to iGoogle.