For some reason my sister can't play her games at Northwest; they're all blocked somehow. I want to help her out but I'm computer illiterate so it's not working very well. Is this a lost cause or is there something she can do?

Or, is this not enough information to help at all?

Your sister is mostly SOL. Northwest specifically bans games and game consoles, and a whole bunch of ofher stuff from the network as can be found in their Network Stability Policy.

She may be able to make a case for "Recreational and academic ports" but I wouldn't count on it.

Dang, I was afraid of that. No chance to play Ragnarok online - Rebirth, then.

I spent a few semesters at Northwest. They disable everything in the name of security. If you ask them for more details as to how some policies relate to security they can't give you an answer. From what I've experienced, their IT staff is pretty incompetent, paranoid, and few in number. Anything they don't know how to setup or take care of is a security risk and therefore most be disabled/blocked/not allowed.

what if she uses her computer to bridge connections from her game console to her lan connection to the school network. only instead of passing all packets straight from console to computer, use Tor to vpn so the school can't filter her network connection. this may cause the internet to be much slower, but if you set up a private server for her to connect to - it shouldn't be nearly as slow.

Won't it use the same ports? I'm not familiar with Northwest, but it sounds like they are blocking all ports except those used for specifically authorized services.

At Nortwest, anything other than XP SP2 and Domain Support is not allowed to join the wireless network. If you look at some of the stuff the dis-allow explicitly it gets pretty stupid.

wow! no vpn-ing out from the LAN and no mac/linux/vista on the wireless? well...

it IS northwestern MO. fear of technolgy doesn't surprise me. kind of like here (sout/central missouri region) they prohibit ADULTS attending the university from living off campus without approval (you should be required to be approved to live ON campus!) i mean -> its practically one step away from us praying to our Lord, and savior, Jesus Christ who hates evolution and Muslims before every evening dinner.

It gets even better, they require Windows XP, and if you want wireless it pretty much has to be XP Pro. They secifically ban anything able to remotely restart a computer over a lan. A user with Admin privlidges and execute a remote shutdown/restart of that computer from another XP computer on the network. Thus Windows XP is banned.

Great to see they are in violation of thier own policy.