set-up difficulties

[hjenkins]

Hello, all,

I just moved to Cambridge two weeks ago. Sorry that my first mailing list
post is a request for help, but I've just gotten a connection for my
(Gentoo Linux) laptop in my university department, and I'm having some
difficulties.

It seems that nearly every port save 80 & 110 is blocked, but there are
also some problems which seem to stem from other restrictions. rsync,
webrsync, SMTP, XMPP, and ping don't work. All worked fine from the local
webcafé.

There's also something wrong with the way in which dhcpcd and the local
server talk, and the department computer person (who doesn't control these
rules) made HTTP work using
>dhcpcd -I "01:my_hardware_address" -A eth0
Otherwise the server doesn't recognize my computer and ignores its requests.

If anyone else has had these problems, I would love to learn from your
struggles rather than my own.

Secondly, are you actively holding meetings? If so, when?

Thanks, and best wishes.