Accessibility statement

Unmanaged office connections

An unmanaged connection allows network access through an office network socket. You will be able to access the internet, and set up connections to your filestore and York Print Plus, but will not be able to use centrally provided software.

Any problems with setting up the machine, connecting to the network, or accessing filestore and printers should be referred to your Departmental Computing Officer in the first instance.

On this page:

What do I need to do?

Ensure that you are following Departmental procedures in requesting an unmanaged connection: you may be required to make the request via your Departmental Computing Officer (DCO).

To be able to set up an unmanaged connection, you will need:

  • An ethernet card and network cable.
  • A connected network socket in your office. If you don't have a socket, or you believe an existing one is not live, contact the IT Support. You will need to provide your room number and/or socket number where appropriate.

You will then need to inform IT Services of the machine details so they can be added to the LAN database. This can be done by emailing itsupport@york.ac.uk with the following details:

  • the Ethernet address (also known as MAC or physical address) of the machine
  • the location of the machine

Any other information you can provide (eg operating system, serial number) is also useful.

The Ethernet address is a 12 digit hexadecimal number that uniquely identifies your network adapter. It is provided on a sticker on the Ethernet card, and can also be found by looking at your configuration properties.

In Windows, open a Command Prompt (in Windows 7/10 type cmd in the search box after clicking the Windows logo) and type ipconfig /all. You should get a similar output to this:

Ethernet Adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-Specific DNS Suffix . : york.ac.uk

Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : PCI Ethernet Adapter

Physical Address . . . . . . . . . . . : 08-00-27-C4-A6-6A <-this is the number we need

DHCP Enabled . . . . . . . . .  . . . : Yes

IP Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 168.165.29.5 (etc...)

In Mac OSX or Linux open a Terminal (in Mac OSX go to Applications | Utilities, select Terminal) and run ifconfig -a:

user@computer:~$ ifconfig -a

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1c:c0:bf:3d:24 <- this is the number we need

inet addr:144.32.226.214 Bcast:144.32.227.255 Mask:255.255.254.0

inet6 addr: fe80::21c:c0ff:febf:3d24/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:130849 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:180834 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

RX bytes:73325387 (73.3 MB) TX bytes:222092038 (222.0 MB)

Memory:e0300000-e0320000

An IT Services technician will get back to you within three working days with information about your connection. For example:

Object name : byzpc04 - Unsupp. 7 PC
Machine type : Viglen Genie P4 2.4A - - Serial number 1699969-bz
Operating System : Windows 7
Department/contact : Byzantine Studies / Joe Bloggs
Location : BS/016B <3418>
Date Inserted : 11-AUG-2015
Interface type : Ethernet
MAC address : 0007F926C8C4
Attachment Point : bsroute1
IP address : 144.32.5.40
Gateway : 144.32.5.76
DHCP type : Minimal DHCP Info

You should check that the MAC address, contact details and location information are correct.

Note the line that starts 'DHCP'. DHCP lets the central server tell your computer its network address, rather than you setting it up by hand. The major advantage of using DHCP is that once your connection is set up and working you do not need to change the configuration details if you move location - all you will need to do is let the IT Support Office know your new location and your IP address will be updated remotely. We recommend all machines are set to use DHCP, and that you should only enter static IP address information as a last resort.

How do I set up my machine?

This guide describes how to set up Windows 7 or 10 machines, with notes about Mac, Unix and Linux. For other operating systems, you should consult their documentation.

Windows

It is more than likely that the default configuration of Windows (7, 8 or 10) will just work, but if the computer has previously been configured differently then you may need to follow the following steps:

Configuring LAN in Windows 7/10:

  1. Select Network and Sharing Centre from the Control Panel
  2. Click Change Adapter Settings
  3. Right click on Local Area Connection
  4. Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)
  5. Click Properties
  6. Check the boxes marked Obtain an IP address Automatically and Obtain DNS server address automatically
  7. Click OK to close the Internet Protocol Properties box and OK to close the Local Area Connection box

An easy test will be to open a web browser and open www.york.ac.uk.

Guides for connecting to filestore and network printers are available.

Mac OS X

Once added to the LAN database, Mac OS X machines should work without any additional network setup.

To check connectivity, try and open www.york.ac.uk.

Mac users may access their central filestore by connecting to smb://userfs.york.ac.uk/username, substituting username with your own username.

Guides for connecting to filestore and network printers are available.

Setting up Linux/Unix or similar machines

The network management software varies depending on which distribution you are using, so refer to the help documentation specific to your distribution to set your PC to DHCP. It is likely that any modern version it will work out of the box.

Setting up the filestore will require SAMBA installed on your system. Once this is set up you can usually access the filestore by opening smb://userfs.york.ac.uk/username in a file browser, again this may be different depending in which version of Linux/Unix you are using.

Other systems/manual setup

If your machine cannot be set to DHCP, the following information will be required in addition to the information you received when you registered your machine:

Subnet Mask: 255.255.254.0

DNS: 144.32.128.242  &  144.32.128.243

Domain: york.ac.uk

WINS: 144.32.128.4  &  144.32.190.4

Troubleshooting

If you're having problems with viewing www.york.ac.uk after following the above steps, open a terminal or command prompt and type ping teaching0. If you get an output similar to the text below, then the network configuration is fine and there is a problem with your web browser configuration:

PING teaching0.york.ac.uk (144.32.196.246) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from teaching0.york.ac.uk (144.32.196.246): icmp_seq=1 ttl=252 time=0.253 ms

64 bytes from teaching0.york.ac.uk (144.32.196.246): icmp_seq=2 ttl=252 time=0.431 ms

64 bytes from teaching0.york.ac.uk (144.32.196.246): icmp_seq=3 ttl=252 time=0.279 ms

64 bytes from teaching0.york.ac.uk (144.32.196.246): icmp_seq=4 ttl=252 time=0.221 ms

  1. Open Internet Explorer
  2. Go to Tools | Internet Options
  3. Go to Connections and open LAN Settings
  4. Check that Automatically Detect Settings is ticked and no proxy server is set

Try opening the webpage again. If you still have problems, please contact the IT Support.