Contents:

1) Farhad Divecha joins the NAS team.
2) Active Directory page
3) IRIS progress
4) NAS Fall 2000 Workshop/Course schedule
5) Net Admin to speak on Firewalls
6) Security Issues

1. Farhad Divecha has joined our Network Administrators Support Group as a graduate assistant. Farhad is a graduate student of the college of Business Administration. His primary duties will include documentation and training. Farhad is looking forward to learning more about networking, and providing useful information to network administrators. To read more about him, visit his webpage at http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~divecha

2. Information on the campus Active Directory project is available at: http://www.ad.uiuc.edu.

3. IRIS progress.

Iris version 3.1 was released on September 9, 2000 with stable write support. The ph alias iris now refers to this version instead of the old version 2 that was stable during testing of 3.0. Because the IRIS url changes in most releases, one should edit one's bookmarks for Iris to use the URL http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/iris which we will always point to the current supported release. If you include uiuc.edu in the default domains of your DNS configuration, you should be able to load Iris by typing as little as "www/~iris" in your browsers location box. The IRIS Revision History link off this page details the changes in version 3.1.

On Thursday, October 5, 2000 Mark Zinzow will present a brief overview of features in the current release of the Iris switch management tool.
Then we'll review the features that have been requested and request feedback from Iris users to help us set priorities for future development. The programmers Vikram Kulkarni and Jimmy Shin will be on hand to discuss technical details.

4) NAS Fall 2000 Workshop/Course schedule

Date    Room      Time            Class
09/29  1330 DCL   2-5 pm       Networking Basics
10/5   2240 DCL   3:30-4:30pm  Workshop: IRIS
10/20  1330 DCL   2-5 pm       Windows 9x/NT Networking Basics
11/7   1330 DCL   2-5 pm       Networking Basics

5) Network Administrator to speak on Firewalls.

Network Administrator Ken Tarman will speak on Personal Firewall software at the next PC User's Group meeting on Tuesday, October 10, 2000 from 7-9pm in 1310 DCL. The free ZoneAlarm software from Zone Labs http://www.zonelabs.com/ as well as BlackICE Defender from Network ICE http://www.networkice.com/ will be discussed.

6) Security Issues

There have been unusually high numbers of virus and security problems of late. The virus issues have been addressed in a recent post to the drsol-l listserv http://listserv.uiuc.edu/archives/drsol-l.html.

The Red Hat, Inc. Security Advisory RHSA-2000:043-04 last updated 8/29/00 describes a flaw in the rpc.statd daemon in the nfs-utils package shipped in Red Hat Linux 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 that has been a popular remote root break-in exploit on campus systems.  Compromised systems are usually used to deploy the Trinity v3 Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) tool described at: http://xforce.iss.net/alerts/advise59.php.
Red Hat Support has a comprehensive list of updates at: http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/updates.html.

Other available security references include the Beckman Institute Systems Services (BISS) Network and Computer Security Workshop pages at:
http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/biss/security/ with materials from numerous presentations on how to secure systems including one on Securing RedHat Linux. and SecurityFocus.Com http://www.securityfocus.com/ which is the home of the Bugtraq mailing list and archives and loaded with useful information and links.

The next BISS Network and Computer Security Workshop is 10/3/00 on Patching Linux Packages and the Kernel.