[sean.bonner]

On an internet network (such as University one), does every user have the same IP address, or is it still different for each user?

[chris]

markslog is probably the best guy to break it down for you, but yes every user has a different internal IP address, but how that is translated to your external IP varies depending on the set-up at your institution.

[markslog]

At the University of Guelph all computers have atleast one unique external / public IP address including all students living in Residence (5000). Each Student Residence building is broken up into smaller VLANs.
For the students, they get their IP address using DHCP where the DHCP lease is very short. This is to prevent people from hosting things from their computer.

As an aside quite a few universities implement quota limitations (Guelph has a 5GB upload and 5GB download - whatever you reach first) on a per week basis.

But it really depends on the university though. Guelph happens to be quite a large school. There might be smaller colleges/universities that use NAT where the students IP Address is a private address (i.e. 192.168.x.y or 10.10.x.y) and the external IP address is the same for everyone. Obviously when NAT is used it makes it more difficult to setup a server unless you have control over the gateway router.

[sean.bonner]

Thanks Mark,
Great info there. I guess I'll try and look into how the Dalhousie University network is run.