Contents:

1) Firewalls
2) Campus Bandwidth
3) Switch Upgrade Class
4) Moving/Renumbering servers
5) Spanning Tree Problems with HP 2524
6) SSL
7) UI Archive

1. Firewall Classes

Mary Stevens will be offering 2 firewall classes for Network Administrators in April. An announcement will be made to the CCSP group with the specific times and dates. There has recently been a resurgence of Code Red and it is still important to have your machines patched. SNMP will continue to be filtered at the campus edge until all vendor patches have been released.

2. Campus Bandwidth

The Backbone group is happy to announce that UIUC will be expanding the Internet bandwidth with a new 45mbit pipe from Verio within the next few weeks.

3. Switch Upgrade Class

NAS is sponsoring a switch upgrade class to be conducted by LAN maintenance on April 22nd, from 1:00pm to 2:30pm in room 2240 DCL. The class will cover switch upgrades and maintenance of departmental switches, as well as basic trouble shooting procedures.

4. Moving/Renumbering servers

A reminder that when moving or renumbering your departmental servers, it is important to give the host manager a minimum of 3 days advance notice so that she is able to reduce the time to live appropriately. Failure to do so could prevent off-campus clients from reaching your servers until the next time their DNS reloads.

5. Spanning Tree Problems with HP 2524

If you have an HP 2524 switch that your department maintains, this is news you can use. There is a known problem with spanning tree and the HP's. The current version of code from HP is F.04.08. Spanning tree should be set to standard; the bug is caused by setting Spanning Tree to Rapid, which causes the switch to initiate a message flood to the network. More information about this can be obtained during the switch class on April 22nd (See Item #3).

6. SSL now available on student/staff clusters

Campus now has an SSL accelerator. This is a hardware device that properly wraps/unwraps encryption routines and is currently being used on the email clusters. Enabling SSL allows for a more secure mail environment. Network latency is not noticeably increased due to the hardware accelerator that is in place. For more information on enabling SSL, you can view the following web page: http://www.cso.uiuc.edu/security/ssl/ssl_client_win.html

7. UI Archive

UIArchive is a repository of files that are kept on campus in an effort to reduce load on our bandwidth. Frequently requested files are available there, including anti-virus software, Operating Systems, Imaging software, and others. We've noticed a heavy load on the server Thursdays at 3pm. This is the default time of the current UIUC installer. If at all possible, we would like to ask personnel to change their times to balance the load placed upon the server.