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.

The New Day

Changed the wordpress theme, lot needs to be done still.

Its the time of changes. And its going to begin soon!

Starting from my blog, my techclub delta to my life. I hope its a success.

Saw the blog of Sahil Ahuja. Had heard about him a lot before, but tonight I saw with my own eyes what things he has done for delta. I have never been to this link before on delta : http://delta.nitt.edu/doku/doku.php/delta/delta ( Only accessible from inside college ). Its like an abandoned place, but I discovered it somehow and there lies the work of the previous to previous year batch (sahil ahuja’s batch) work of delta cores. Its kind of remarkable, I mean those days everything was put up in place by those guys. Meetings were held on time, attendance of members were noted, those absent for two consecutive meetings were in danger to be chucked out, all the project works going on were tracked, lots of treats 🙂 and lots of classes. As a rough estimate, the work currently going on in delta is not even one-third of the work done during that batch.

There’s a lot to learn and lot to understand. Being a core member now,  I feel the responsibility of fixing things up. But its a long tiring time-consuming process and time I dont have. With the added pressure of fine tuning my algo skills, I have lots of work to do : mailing to profs inside and outside the country to make sure I have something to do in summer of 2010, then supervising the projects going on in delta especially working on the new college website, then my own research project on graph theory is underway and a paper needs to written for publication, finally I have to make sure I give enough time to SPOJ and Topcoder. Its difficult to be actively involved in delta during these tough times, but its only going to be harder the next semester. If I have to do something, I have to do it now and that is something I know for sure. Rest I am confused.

But hopefully, I will be a able to get a clearer look soon. Needs to clarify a lot of things, but can only concentrate when the work load lightens. Till then, have to work hard to keep pace with the ongoing things. I wish myself best of luck, hoping to write something back in my blog very soon.