Hello this isn’t strictly ‘selfhosted’ material but there seems to be a lot of networking knowledge in this group.
I’m thinking of leveraging my universities network to assist in downloading “Linux ISO’s” via torrent. I thought a cool little project would be and old rasberry pi with a battery pack, wifi radio and an external hdd in a box would be cool.
Considering I have to use a university supplied email and password, unique to me, to connect to the wifi (only once then it connects like normal). How obvious will it be that I am downloading “Linux ISO’s”? I’d definitely be running a VPN as a base level of privacy.
Also if there is a better community for this please point me in the right direction. Reddit’s adds were annoying but it was definitely easier to stumble onto relevant subreddits.
Typically schools and universities have acceptable use policies for student VPNs. It is not very difficult to detect VPN setup on a network and universities almost always have at least some form of network monitoring happening.
That said, VPNs are often times blocked and so is SFTP. Most universities I’ve done work with have a requirement that the traffic will be blocked unless you can make a case to IT as to why you need that access.
There are few legitimate use cases for student VPNs and IT staff are usually not idiots and understand what you are up to.
I get that part, and it all makes total sense. I was only confused on the “torrents will be detected” part of the original comment.