6 things to know about NIT Trichy

1. NIT Trichy is considered among the top 15 engineering institutes of India, and the best among all the NITs.
As an experienced student of NIT Trichy, I believe the credibility of the above statement depends on how you “judge” the NITs. If your judgement is purely based on placements and packages, then I can assure with no doubt that NIT Trichy is not just the best among all NITs but also better than a few IITs. However, if you also take into account student facilities, mess food, internet access and faculty profiles, then I myself doubt it.

2. Students have a much greater role to play here than any other college.
Its true, students of NIT Trichy are not just mere college-going children, but they are involved in extra and co-curricular works, projects and clubs of far greater significance. While the computing clubs like Delta Force are the sole incharge of the college website & LAN, the enterpreneurship club ECELL have made their presence felt across the globe with their flagship annual event Ventura. Besides these, there are leisure clubs like Karate, Photography, Movie Making, Dance Troupe, Music Troupe, etc. Other technical clubs include GLUG-T (Linux & FOSS) and Sun Club (JAVA & Open Source Apps).

3. An abundant number of events for the students to keep them busy for the entire year.
NIT Trichy can boast of a huge number of quality student events that take place annually. It ranges widely from the fresher’s parties organized by the student clubs to various kinds of campus games and contests, along with the academic classes on java, linux, matlab, c++, web,etc by the technical clubs. Moreover, the college’s main events like Pragyan, Festember and NITT Fest are entirely managed by the students with literally no intervention from the authorities.

4. The prestigious Bachelor of Survival degree (B.Surv).
Every student of NIT Trichy not only gets a B.Tech degree but also a B.Surv degree (though he doesn’t get a certificate for that). By survival in NIT Trichy, I mean surviving the extremities the authorities push the students into. With exams next morning and power being cut-off from your hostels, with horrible quality of mess food, with drinking water problems and just 10 kbps internet access, if you’re still able to complete your B.Tech in 4 years, then you truly are worthy of a B.Surv.

5. NIT Trichy is a haven for Computer Science and VLSI students.
As far as VLSI is concerned, NIT Trichy is considered as the “best” in the country. The faculty of the ECE Department are especially dedicated towards VLSI and have a number of modern laboratories for that purpose. OCTAGON, the largest computing centre is full of high-end computers and its 24×7 availability along with a huge library and elibrary has turned it into a driving factor for the students to get interested in computing.

6. Quality food is abundant, but be ready to empty your pockets.
Forget the mess for one day and you have a number of places as alternatives. I’ve never seen so many food locations in any institute of the country. Inside the campus you have a bakery, a restaurant, an icecream parlour, another bakery-cum-restaurant-cum-icecream parlour, a milk shake shop, a juice corner, 2 nescafes, 1 bru and 1 lipton stalls. Just outside the campus you have 3 dhabas, a proper restaurant and a number of small food stalls.

To be continued … For further readings on NIT Trichy, click here.

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.