Despite rumors, Princeton has not banned the iPad from campus. It has however, found a bug (and workaround) with Apple’s latest device.
Describing what they feel is a bug with the iPad’s operating system, Princeton recently announced (via their Knowledge Base):
Network monitoring has shown that many iPad devices have caused a problem on the campus network. These devices continue to use an IP address they have been leased well beyond the time they should. (In technical terms, the device’s DHCP client software stops renewing its lease, but the device keeps using the IP address after the DHCP lease expires. This is not a WiFi issue.) This behavior causes a disruption on the campus network.
Additionally, Princeton posted an extremely thorough description of the problem. Although many articles and news reports have stated that Princeton has “banned” the iPad from it’s network, Princeton assures the public that this simply is not the case. Initially, only the devices having the issue were banned from the network, and those have been allowed to reconnect via a workaround.
Beginning April 4 2010 (prior to having any workaround), when an individual iPad malfunctioned, we would contact the owner to advise him or her of the problem. When the same iPad malfunctioned a second time, we would block that device from using our network, and contact the owner again; at that time we would advise the owner that the blocks would remain in place until there was a fix from Apple, or there was a workaround to the problem.
On a personal note…
The documentation from Princeton on this issue amazes me. It is extremely detailed and may just have raised the bar for incident reports. They have published steps to reproduce the issue as well as a workaround. AND… they made these documents available (easily) to the public. There’s no chest beating, hyperbole, or exaggeration. Just a detailed “this is the problem, this is what we’ve done” document. Amazon should really follow their example.
Links of Interest
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