Happenings

Additional SPAM fighting software has been installed on the systems providing FIRN2 email services. Please let us know how they work for you at support@firn2.net.

SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, has made much news lately as an instrument to prevent SPAM. Some information about SPF and the FIRN2 network can be found in the following document: FIRN2 & SPF

Please note that no one can prevent all SPAM from getting into your mailbox. While we strive to reduce SPAM as much as possible, the methods which spammers are using to generate, deliver, and trick SPAM catching software are constantly evolving. If you think you are receiving unusual amounts of SPAM, please send mail to FIRN2 support personnel at abuse@firn2.net.

The FIRN2 technical presentation to the FIRN advisory committee has been posted. Take a look in the Presentations section of the web site

The FIRN Presentation from FETC 2005 has been posted in the Presentations section of the website.

FIRN E-Rate funding for the 2004-2005 year was approved by the SLD.

The presentations given to the Florida Digital Divide Council has been placed in the Presentations section. In addition, the presentation delivered to the FIRN advisory council on 5/21/04 has also been placed online.

Video conferencing is growing in popularity on a daily basis. One problem with video is that is sensitive to packet loss and delay on the network. The FIRN2 network is designed with video applications in mind but from time to time people still have video conferencing problems. Here are some things to look at on your network to make sure you are getting the video packets onto the FIRN2 network.

1) Check the Duplex and Speed settings on your video device (applience or pc) and make sure they are hard coded to the setting you want (normally 100mbps/full duplex). Do the same on your ethernet switch ports. Though many devices auto-detect duplex and speed correctly, we run into many problems where the combination of hardward being used results in the settings being detected correctly only 80% of the time. This results in complaints that it was working fine a while ago and it is not today. We recommend hard coding the switch ports and the device ports and all links in between the video device and router. Belive it or not, this one issue accounts for over 50% of the performance problems that are reported to the NOC.

2) If you are using a PC based video conferencing solution, are your network parameters set correctly. This is a problem for Windows 95/Me/98/NT. Sometimes, the network parameters were “tuned” to work over slow dialup lines. This can be resolved with programs such as tcptune and others. We have had customers claim to have their connections seem 2 times as fast after tuneing older software (NOTE: this is not a problem with windows 2000, XP and newer). From a customer: Once the bandwidth was established I started searching for the bottleneck. It was nothing more that the TCP/IP settings in WinMe that are tuned for dialup rather that a T-1. Tcptune.exe reset buffer sizes and increased download speeds from 400k to 1.45M.

A new email system was put in place during January 2004 to provide
Florida teachers and school administrators with a state of the art email
system. Besides being much faster, it incorporates many new features
not offered in the past. One of the more popular additions to the
offering is a spam and virus filter which traps and deletes email
viruses and the majority of the unwanted spam. At a time when spam
counts for up to 70% of all email received, this has become a real time
saver for teachers around the state of Florida.

Now (early March), a new webmail server was introduced to access the new
email system for those not wanting to use an email client on their
computer. WEBMAIL replaces the existing FIRN Quickview, an older and
slower webmail system. While Quickview was widely used, it lacked many
of the conveniences teachers wanted, such as usable email folders and
the flexibility to manage their own account. This new application,
located at http://webmail.firn.edu offers many of the features found
only in email clients such as Outlook, but now available on the web from
any computer in the world.

This was posted on the NANOG mailing list . It might be of interest to some school districts.

Subject: Re: looking for a review of traffic shapers
From: William Caban
To: NANOG
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:01:29 -0400

A resume of some of the answers I have received:

What’s missing from (at least some) current traffic shaping appliances
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joe/what-shapers-need.pdf

Ten Odd Strategies for Picking Numerical Values for Your Traffic Shaper
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joe/picking-a-shaper-policy.pdf

The Case for Traffic Shaping at Internet2 Schools
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joe/i2-traffic-shaping.ppt

Bandwidth Management Strategies and Methodologies
http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/~cgaylord/talks/20020507-i2bandwidth.pdf

Bandwidth Managers: Going With The Flow
http://www.bcr.com/bcrmag/2003/04/p32.asp

Reviewing Packet Shaping Products
http://www.net.cmu.edu/docs/arch/qospe-pre.html

Succesful Bandwidth Management at Crnegie Mellon
http://www.net.cmu.edu/pres/jt0803/

Bandwidth Management Technologies
http://www.etinc.com/index.php?page=bwcompare.htm

Thanks everyone.

-W

On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 17:36, William Caban wrote:
> I’m looking for a review/report on traffic/packet shapers products with
> a side-by-side comparison. Did any one has a clue where I can find one
> such report?
>
> Thanks,
> -W
–
William Caban

The FIRN E-Mail Registration is back on-line. The URL to access the page is register.firn.hcs.net.

The presentation given at the FIRN Advisory Council on 11/14/2003 has been posted. It is in the Presentations section of the links menu.

Several Tools have been added to the web site to test H.323 services across the network. They have been placed in the QoS downloads area in the links menu.

Nessus security scanner is software which will audit remotely a given network and determine whether bad guys(aka ‘crackers’) may break into it, or misuse it in some way. It is Freeware but does require some knowledge of UNIX/LINUX to use. It works very well.

If you do not already have a tool for doing security audits on your network you may want to try this one. If you already have a security scanner, you may want to run this one also.

The nessus home page is http://www.nessus.org/

A short tutorial/review of nessus is located at http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1741

A reminder that the Florida Educational Technology Conference is comming up. January 22-24, 2004 in Orlando. It is huge conference with many exhibits and training sessions. There will also be several updates on FIRN2 and related services.

Check out their web page at www.fetc.org for more information

This is nifty university research. Many of the universities in the state have gotten together to create a research network around Florida. It is called Florida Lambda Rail. The concept is to purchase/lease dark fiber from many of the phone companies that have fallen on hard times. At a presentation at the FAEDS conference they expected to have completed a 10gbps fiber network between many of the universities in the state over the next 18 months. This is part of a bigger project called the National Lambda Rail project. The Florida website is at http://www.flrnet.org . The presentation given at FAEDS in on the presentations portion of their web site.

The NSA has published and continues to update security recommendations for Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Cisco Routers and other information. If you are an administrator of any of these devices you should take a look. They are produced by your tax dollars. The guides are located at http://nsa2.www.conxion.com/.

While at the FAEDS conference I attended a very good presentation by Kathy Bergsma (University of Florida/IT) entitled “Building a Network Security Program” . The pointer to the presentation is http://net-services.ufl.edu/~kathya/faeds.ppt. Incuded in the presentation is a number of links to other places. It is a real good presentation.

She also mentioned another web site http://www.itsa.ufl.edu/which is the IT Security Awareness page for the University of Florida. Check it out also.

We have had a number of customers recently call the help desk complaining that their computer and network is slow. Many of these people have been hit by Spybots.

What is a spybot? A program that is downloaded to your PC that records where you go on the web and then reports that information back to a central repository. It is primarly used to get a marketing profile on you that can be sold to someone for direct marketing. Whether this is good or bad is up to you. The problem we see is that a computer might have 50 different pieces of spyware reporting to 50 different locations taking all of the computer CPU and network capacity to do this.

What we have been recommending is for people to download a nice freeware program called spybot search and destroy. Go to yahoo or google and search for this and there are plenty of places to download it. It takes 10 min. to run on your computer and that way you can at least see if you have any of this spyware and then you can decide what to do if anything about it. It works really well and has received many good reviews. (the main home page for this program is at http://spybot.eon.net.au)

Many people who run this and remove the spyware claim that their computer runs much faster as a result of getting rid of the programs.

The FIRN2 lessons learned document has been posted. Take a look at it at http://www.firn2.net/Documents/FIRN2-Lessons-Learned.htm