Connect external device to workplace network storage

[RoyceJ]

My school's laptop program is pretty rubbish in terms of choice and I've been given the green light to bring my windows 10 laptop and connect to the network. I can connect to the wifi and internet with my regular username and password. Although, I'm on my own trying to connect to the networked storage and shared documents. All the school devices are under a MOE (managed os) and things like cmd, regeddit and even right-clicking in file explorer have been disabled (don't have admin permissions). I'm fairly certain that because of the network setup, if I can find the IP address of the two servers I can map them as network drives.

Does anybody know how to find the IP address and port of a nas? I know of a way to install wireshark onto a device, can I find it that way? Or maybe I can use another network monitor to find the IP address of the server by intercepting open communications (like while transferring files from the server to my drive)? It's also worth noting that I can't just look through the network to find them, there's hundreds of devices connected all labeled with consecutive numbers.

I just need to find a way to map the network drives. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

[IntelFanboy417]

Hello!

Your best bet would be to attempt to use wireshark running on your laptop's WiFi interface to try and see where the school laptop is talking too. Open wireshark on your personal laptop, make sure you're on the same WiFi as your school laptop, transfer a file on the school laptop to the server, and watch wireshark for any traffic. If all goes well you should see the school laptop communicating with the IP address of the storage server.

However, it sounds like your school IT department actually knows what they're doing for once (rare from the school IT departments I've seen), since you stated you had to use your username and password to log into the WiFi.

This means most likely your school's access points are using something called EAP, which is secured WiFi using RADIUS. Meaning if you were to run wireshark on your personal laptop, you probably couldn't view the traffic going to the school laptop.

However, give the wireshark route a test. Or, I know you stated mapping your whole network would be hard, but give fing a shot. https://www.fing.io/download-free-ip-scanner-desktop-linux-windows-osx/

Fing does a pretty good job of identifying what is on the network, and can identify most of the time by using MAC addresses what a device is. So if in fing you see 300 Dell Laptops and 1 Server, you can probably guess which one is the file server.

Best of luck.

 

[RoyceJ]

I'm still pretty new to Wireshark but haven't heard of Fing, it seems like my best bet.
Although after trying 'net view' in cmd. Every other laptop (I think) on the network shows up as well as three similarly named (servers?) 'educati-lettersandnumbers'. The workplace devices have three mapped network drives - Common file server, a My Documents (username based so you can access personal files on any computer you login to), and a common programs drive (Where things like chrome and office are located so they're not installed individually on every device. It's much slower than local installs as you may guess).
So either these three devices are the network drives or are completely unrelated. What I find interesting is when I go to map their IP addresses as network drive I'm asked for a username and password but when I enter mine (user) or an admin's login I'm met with the same Login Incorrect message leading me to believe they're looking for a specific password (but then how do the servers dynamically display files based on the use logged in?).

I can't get into cmd or the registry (as you'd guess) but I can view all the certificates. I'm guessing all of the laptops connect to the wifi, internet, networked drives, etc through certificates like the ipads do. Do you know if/where I can find the network drive certificates?

I'm back tomorrow (12 hours) so I'll let you know how fing and wireshark goes.