March, 2004 Network Nuggets

1. Cluster Migration

The student and staff clusters will be retired at the end of the 2004 Spring semester. If you actively use your cluster account you need to transfer to different services soon. CITES offers two new services that will take over functions of the cluster's primary services after retirement. These two services, CITES Express Mail and CITES NetFiles, address email, file storage and web publishing. These services also provide conversion tools to tranfer existing data from your cluster account to these new services:

Express Mail Conversion:
http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/express/conversion_tool.html
NetFiles Conversion:
http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/netfiles/migration.html

Questions regarding these tools can be addressed by CITES Helpdesk at 244-7000 or by email at consult@uiuc.edu.

2. Cluster Account Deletion Tool

CITES has made a Cluster Account Deletion Tool available for general use. This tool can be accessed through the following address:

https://www-apps.cites.uiuc.edu/cad/

Cluster accounts handle mail to staff.uiuc.edu and students.uiuc.edu as well as some file storage space. If you no longer have any need for your cluster account you are encouraged to delete it.

Please note that this is a ONE-WAY process. This will delete your cluster account in its entirety. This includes email forwarding. If you have email going to netid@staff.uiuc.edu it will no longer be forwarded.

More information on this is available at:

http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/services/changes/guide.html#delete

3. New CITES Home Page

CITES has recently changed its look. Visit http://www.cites.uiuc.edu and look around. If you have any comments or suggestions let us know at http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/about/csi/comments.html

4. Dealing with Viruses

Over the last few weeks campus has been inundated by a host of Bagle, Netsky and MyDoom variants. While CITES has taken steps to stop these viruses at the mail relays some may make it through. Please make sure your virus software is up to date and don't click on those attachments! If your find yourself disconnected from the network due to a filter you can contact the CITES Helpdesk at 244-7000 to obtain software on disk to clean your machine. More information is available at: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/security/

5. UIUC DNS Files

From the desk of the DNS Manager:
UIUC DNS Files now accessible from DNS Webpage

Currently, the UIUC DNS files are copied every day to the staff machine (staff.uiuc.edu) for network administrators to view. The directory where the files are copied is usr/local/share/named. These files will not be available at staff.uiuc.edu, once the retirement of the student/staff cluster occurs.

We now have the replacement location for the UIUC DNS files, and these files are now hosted by the UIUC DNS Tools page. The URL for accessing these files using the UIUC DNS Tools page is:

http://www-dns.cites.uiuc.edu/dnstools

From there, you choose 'Data File Viewing'. You will need to Bluestem authenticate to access the files. The files will be available in both locations until the cluster is retired, at which time they will only be available through the UIUC DNS Tools page.

For more information visit the CITES DNS documentation page at http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/dns.

6. Domain Name Server Changes

From the desk of the DNS Manager:
Hello, Net Admins,

You are receiving this message as a courtesy warning, to let you know that we will be posting a notice (enclosed below) to all users on campus requesting they remove 129.79.5.100 as a DNS server from their configurations. You will notice at the end, that the message indicates they should contact their network administrator if they need help. Please contact hostmgr@uiuc.edu if you have any questions regarding this change.

This is the message we will be posting on the CITES webpage and DNS webpage:


CITES has received word that Indiana University will be changing the address of the machine used for UIUC DNS information. While this will have relatively little impact on day-to-day use, we do use Indiana University's server as a backup for our own servers.

CITES is requesting that any computers on campus using 129.79.5.100 as a DNS server should remove the entry as soon as possible. When Indiana makes their change, 129.79.5.100 (whose host name is ns2.indiana.edu) will become their internal DNS nameserver and reachable only from Indiana University.

Right now, Indiana University is running both the old and new machines, but they would like to deactivate the old one by the end of February.

If you need help making this change, please contact your network administrator or visit http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/dns for more information.

7. Cool Tools

This month's cool tool is CygWin:
http://www.cygwin.com

If you haven't heard of this program it is a linux like environment for Windows. It even comes with it's own X server. Now you can run your Unix apps on your Windows desktop for free.

Run a bash shell, tar a file, even run KDE, the sky's the limit with CygWin. If you're looking for a close, fast mirror try using http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov.