The Stanford campus network
Last revision July 28, 2004
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The Stanford campus network is based primarily on the TCP/IP protocol suite. This allows us to be a direct part of the world-wide Internet. Unlike many corporations, there are no general firewalls between the Stanford network and the rest of the world. This means you have to secure your individual computer against hacker intrusion - there is no firewall to do it for you. This also means there is no firewall to get in the way of using any service anywhere on the Internet.
There is some limited filtering of outside traffic that comes to the Stanford network, and the campus network security office will block traffic from specific sites that are known to be used by hackers. You can see this list of blocked sites on the Stanford University Network Security Team website.
AppleTalk only works within individual buildings. AppleTalk packets can never leave the campus network for any other part of the Internet. So for traditional Macintosh services, the Stanford campus is the entire "network". The newer AppleShare/IP file sharing and lpr style printer access available on MacOS 8 and later use TCP/IP protocols and will operate across the entire internet.
Windows file and print sharing via NetBIOS over TCP/IP is also supported campus-wide because it runs on top of TCP/IP.