Contents:
1) New Admin. survey in progress
2) CCSO networking staff changes: Scott Schingel leaves the NAS team.
3) Web Cache down, replacement to be tested, no ntp on Foundry routers
4) IRIS progress
5) Windows 2000 DNS Issues
6) EtherPeekTM 4 for Windows released January 10
7) High Speed Residential Internet Access via cable or DSL phone
7a) AT&T Cable modems
7b) McLeodUSA DSL
7c) Ameritech SpeedPath ADSL
8) NNTP News Server changes
9) NAS Spring 2000 Workshop/Course schedule
1. Last year's electronic survey was not successful since an insufficient number of folks responded. For the last month we've been calling netadmins by phone. Once we have verified our information, we will correct the few remaining discrepancies between our ARS database and the DNS. At that point a new web based tool will be available for netadmins to delegate administrative rights for several network functions (such as IRIS monitoring, ISS scans, DNS updates) to anyone with a netid. If you have been getting phone messages from us, please try to return our call.
2. Scott Schingel's last day with NAS will be January 31, 2000. He has enjoyed working with net administrators on campus, but is leaving to take advantage of a position with a local business.
Carl Roy has joined our Communications Engineering Group. Carl has extensive networking experience and most recently worked with ITDS in town. Carl's duties will include both network design and backbone networking tasks.
Tammy McMasters is now assisting in the management of the Network Design Office in addition to her current duties as a designer. Tammy has been a critical part of the network design team for many years and is familiar with the networks of most of the buildings on campus. Her technical and organizational skills will be welcome as the NDO continues to meet the campus networking challenges that lie ahead!
3. A hard drive failed in one of our two Cisco Cache Engine CE2050's. The one remaining CE2050 was unable to handle the load on its own so it was taken offline. It was decided to explore newer solutions rather than to try to repair and build on this old technology. The CCSO Communications Engineering Group is working on setting up a new cache engine using the Squid Web Proxy Cache which will receive traffic via the load balancing feature of a new Foundry Networks ServerIron switch. If this works well, it will be used to provide a web cache for the terminal servers and the nets previously served by the Cisco Cache.
CCSO has also recently purchased three Foundry Networks BigIron Switching Routers which provide the functionality of both the Cisco Catalyst 5500 vlan switch and a Cisco 7500 router. Our core backbone devices are no longer all supplied by Cisco. The only issue that might impact network adiministrators is that the Foundry routers do not yet broadcast ntp time information as all our Cisco routers do currently. If you are notified that your network will be moved from a Cisco to a Foundry router, systems using ntp will have to be re-configured to poll ntp.cso.uiuc.edu instead of listening for broadcasts.
4. IRIS progress.
Iris was designed to give network administrators access to statistics from the shared switches on their networks. On the quick reference page for a switch, Iris shows you each ports name, status, speed, traffic (w/ delta), and errors (w/ delta). From this page, you can select any ports you are interested in, and view the following information about them; speed, name, inbound and outbound errors, administrative status, operational status, inbound and outbound traffic, inbound and outbound discards, single collisions, multiple collusions, excess collisions, late collisions, oversize frames, crc errors, alignment errors, and duplex. If there are other fields in the Cisco MIBs that you would like to see, mail Vikram Kulkarni (vkulkarn@uiuc.edu). You can read through Cisco's MIBs at http://www.cisco.com/public/mibs/supportlists/.
The current release of Iris is at: https://www-s1.cso.uiuc.edu/iris2/. Once you have selected a vlan you get a list of switches. A new feature that had been frequently requested is now available from this page: you can now get a list of all Mac Addresses the switch knows about with port information on each one. To request authorization for Iris, please email admin-help@uiuc.edu. If you are not the primary network administrator for your network, we will ask that person for approval before granting authorization.
In its next revision, Iris will gain SNMP write support. This will allow you to set the Speed, Duplex, and Name of the port. This update should be released by mid February. After that we'll try to expand the number of supported switches.
5. Windows 2000 DNS Issues
Windows 2000 is scheduled for commercial release on February 17, 2000, but is
already available now on campus through
Central Stores. A key feature of
interest is Active Directory Services. CCSO's NDO and DUS groups have been testing
this feature with beta copies of Windows 2000 and have demonstrated
that it can work without enabling dynamic update on our main campus dns servers, but
only within a delegated slave zone configured by hostmgr, with
its own DDNS server. Attempts to implement AD in a testing
fashion totally without dynamic dns were not successful.
These groups are still working on these issues, and with DUS departments currently using the UIUC master domain, so more information will come later. In the meantime, Microsoft has much detailed information at the Windows 2000 Home Page http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/ including the documents: Windows 2000 DNS White Paper and Active Directory Architecture.
6. EtherPeekTM 4 for Windows released January 10.
AG Group, Inc.
has released EtherPeekTM 4 for Windows.
EtherPeek has been a popular Ethernet network traffic and protocol
analyzer on campus for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Please
see the AG Group web site for product details and features.
7. High Speed Residential Internet Access is here, with new options coming very soon.
Unlike ISDN, which seemed to take decades for the Telcos to deploy, DSL ( Digital Subscriber Lines) and cable modems are rapidly coming to market. Not only are higher speed connections coming very soon, but they are getting cheaper. Already there are a plethora of "free" dial-up services, some locally offering faster connections than the standard UIUC dialups. One company has announced that it will provide free DSL. These freebies are a topic of the next PC User's Group meeting on campus.
The local newsgroup cmi.consumer.isp is a good source of information and local discussion. A recent post there includes information on a proposed local Cable Modem Users Group. For the moment cable modems are the only choice rivaling ISDN for faster connections, but a lucky few are already using DSL with widespread service due the second quarter of this year. Here's a bit more on the three offerings coming soon:
7a. AT&T Cable modems.
Our local cable modem service is AT&T @Home. The local home page for this service is: http://www.att-cable.com/. Information on rates and speed is listed on the national FAQ page at: http://www.athome.att.com/pages/faq.html. Some individuals who signed up for this should be receiving service any day now.
Since @Home is primarily an entertainment service, it will not be possible to use UIUC funds to pay for it.
@Home bandwidth is limited to 128Kbps upload, and download speeds are uncertain as they depend on several shared resources.
One IP address is included in the base service, two additional cost($4.95/month each).
7b. McLeodUSA DSL.
McLeodUSA is several months into a Beta test of ADSL in this market. There are 17 sites up and running, and another 6 in progress with Ameritech.
Some of the existing sites have PVC's (permanent virtual circuits) back to the UIUC network. McLeodUSA has an OC-3 in place between their ATM network and the University's ATM network, so there is plenty of bandwidth to transport UIUC faculty and staff data traffic back to UIUC.
Hopefully by early in the second quarter, they will have their commercial offering available. The base ADSL offering is a 1 Mbps downstream, 256 Kbps upstream service. The ADSL service is added on top of an existing (or new) McLeodUSA POTS line. The charges for the POTS line are standard, and it can be used for making phone calls concurrently with using the ADSL service. The additional charge for the 1 Mbps/256 Kbps ADSL service is $29.95 a month. If you want a PVC to McLeodUSA's Internet service, that is an additional $20 a month, making the full service with Internet access $49.95 a month, plus the cost of the POTS line. That POTS line could be someone's only phone line at home, so that is not necessarily an additional cost.
If a UIUC staff member wanted the PVC to go to the University, the total charge from McLeodUSA would only be $29.95 a month plus the cost of the POTS line. That would put the staff members in UIUC IP space, and subject to the rules of the University for its use. The University (CCSO) will charge a fee comparable to McLeodUSA's for access to the University's Internet connection, but that bill would come from the U of I, not McLeodUSA.
The first "flavor" of DSL they will be deploying in this market is ADSL, and that is likely to be all that is available until late summer. ADSL will not make it to many of the neighborhoods in C-U, so it is not a community wide solution. They are looking at other versions of DSL with greater reach, or the ability to work over a hybrid fiber/copper loop. There are also some ways of locating our equipment at the end of a fiber loop that could extend the range of ADSL.
There are no firm plans for anything other than ADSL served out of the two Ameritech Central Offices at this time. The rough range for that service is two miles as the crow flies from either of the CO's. With no guarantees, that makes the geographic boundaries roughly, Vine in Urbana on the east, Mattis in Champaign on the West, Bradley on the North, and Kirby/Florida on the South. The corners of that area may not be serviceable with ADSL, and in come cases we may be able to go further than those boundaries.
There is a one-time charge of $150 to get the loop installed and conditioned, and the ADSL "modem" costs $250. There will probably be early adopter discounts and discounts for signing a long term contract on the one-time charge and the modem cost. If the PVC is to McLeodUSA's Internet service, then customers get 5 useable NAT addresses for the base price. If a McLeodUSA Internet customer needs static IP addresses, they will be available for an extra charge. They have several sites with LAN's being supported by ADSL.
McLeodUSA has ADSL service offerings that currently go as high a 6 Mbps. Once you get more than 10-15 blocks from the CO however, the maximum downstream bandwidth drops to 2 Mbps. At the fringe of the service area (Charley Kline's house, George Badger's house) it drops of to 640 Kbps, although Charley says he has been getting 110 Kbps on FTP transfers lately.
By comparison however, 640 Kbps for $49.95 a month is more attractive than the UIUC ISDN offering of 128 Kbps for $130 a month.
Because the University provides "free" dial-up, the economic case for ADSL is a little less strong than it would be for a commercial ISP customer. Still if you have a second phone line dedicated to dial-up, that will run $20 a month, Measured Local Service could add $5 - $10 a month to that if you use the Internet a lot. So even with the University's "free" service, a staff member might be spending $25-$30 a month on Internet access. The $49.95 service would double their cost, but give them the ability of using 20-25 times greater bandwidth.
For people who live outside the ADSL service area, an AT&T cable modem may be the best bet in the short term for extra bandwidth. In six months to a year, chances are good that DSL will be deployed outside the current boundries.
McLeodUSA Web resources are under development to support their ADSL offerings, but are not available yet.
7c. Ameritech SpeedPath ADSL.
Ameritech does not yet offer their DSL service in this area, but the word is they plan to start during the second quarter of this year. Their advertised bandwith is less than the comparable McLeodUSA offering. They have two separate separate web sites with similar information. The pricing schedule is located in the FAQ's. The URL's are: http://www.ameritech.net/visitors/speedpath/products_frm.html and http://www.ameritech.com/navigation/site/1,1935,236,00.html.
8) The CCSO campus news server was recently upgraded.
Just after the start of new year, a new RAID unit replaced the old one, the OS was upgraded, and the news server software itself was replaced.
The old news server software was INN 1.5.1 from a public domain source effort. The new news server software we are currently using is called Typhoon from bCandid Software. This package offers several features which we will be testing and offering to the campus.
9) NAS Spring 2000 Workshop/Course schedule
Date Room Time Class 2/8 1330DCL 1-4 pm Networking Basics 2/22 2240DCL 1-4 pm Workshop: Internet Security Scan (ISS) 3/14 1330DCL 1-4 pm Networking in Windows 9x/NT 3/28 2240DCL 1-4 pm Workshop: Network Monitoring--