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PNCE News
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The campus Office of Information Technology has recently announced that as of Monday, 2 Sept 2002, the campus networking people will be blocking access to Microsoft Networking file shares and Samba shares between campus and off-campus. The details can be found at the URL: http://www.oit.umd.edu/News/Archive/2002/NetBIOS.html
This change should not negatively affect most people in the Physics building. You are only affected if you have created shares on your hard drive and have made them accessible to people off campus, or if you are accessing shares on a computer off campus. As a general rule, PCS does not set up Microsoft networking for users because of the significant security issues, so you or someone you work with would have to had set this up. Therefore, if you do not understand what Microsoft networking and shares are, you will most likely be unaffected by this policy change.
If you do use Microsoft networking to share files, you can continue to do so with other people within the department and in other departments on campus. Home users connecting via the campus annex modem pool can be considered "on- campus" for this purpose. Similarly, off-campus users connecting via the campus VPN service are also considered "on-campus" for this purpose.
The decision to block this traffic at the campus border was made to enhance the IT security of campus. The Office of Information Technology notes an average of more than one Windows NT/2000 compromise per day for the year in which the attacker gained access using vulnerabilities in Microsoft Networking protocols. They also observe roughly 200,000 attempts per week of hackers probing our Windows NT/2000 boxes for these vulnerabilities. There is also concern that if defensive measures such as this are not taken, campus machines might be used by terrorists as part of a distributed denial of service attacks against critical components of the national IT infrastructure.
This decision was made at a campus level, not by PCS. However, PCS will gladly answer any questions users may have about whether or not this will affect them, and will advise any affected users on ways to prevent this from interrupting their work. Please submit a physhelp, if you have any questions or need assistance.
Physics Computing Services is planning to shutdown a number of services on the NSCP-I AIX cluster on Tuesday, 15 Jan 2002. Specifically, email and web services will be turned off on this cluster at that time.
These services are available more robustly on the newer departmental PNCE-Unix cluster. The NSCP-I cluster cannot currently provide these services as reliably as the PNCE-Unix cluster does, and, as the NSCP-I cluster is getting on in years, the quality of service that can be provided will only deteriorate. Any attempt on PCS's part to continue these services may dilute our efforts to the point of negatively impacting the quality of these services on the main departmental PNCE-Unix cluster.
Also, the NSCP-I cluster is not designed for the component upgrades as the PNCE-Unix cluster is, and therefore has a finite usable lifespan. We are now seeing machines begin to experience hardware failures which are effectively not repairable. Although there are no plans to discontinue the cluster at this time, eventually enough machines will have died that the cluster is no longer viable. Part of the reason for the turning off email and web services now is so that these essential services can be migrated in a controlled and planned manner rather than desperately when the cluster dies.
The date for the shutdown was selected somewhat arbitrarily. Therefore, if you rely on these services and have a major conflict with that date (e. g., a major conference or report due just shortly after the date), please contact us and we can discuss shifting the date forward or backward a couple of weeks. Unless you hear otherwise, however, assume the date of 15 Jan 2002 is the actual cutoff date.
The following is a more detailed explanation of what will and will not be affected by the service shutdown, and some options PCS will be making available to ease the transition:
http://nscp.umd.eduor
http://katherine.physics.umd.eduwill no longer be available to anyone, on any NSCP I system. PCS will try to provide a setup so that, when people use the former URL, they will get a page informing them that this web server has been retired, and and then be pointed to the main departmental web servers to look for their pages there. It is not clear how specific we can be in doing this (i. e. we can probably inform web surfers that http://nscp.umd.edu/~payerle doesn't exist and they should look on http://www2.physics.umd.edu, but we might not be able to inform them that they should change payerle to tpayerle). We will likely only be able to do this for the http://nscp.umd.edu URLs; the http://katherine.physics.umd.edu URLs (which you weren't supposed to be using) will likely just break.
user@nscpmail.physics.umd.eduwill no longer receive email. However, see #6b below.user@katherine.physics.umd.eduuser@_some_AIX_machine_.physics.umd.edu
The jist of 6a and 6b is that people can continue to send mail to your NSCP-1 address, and we will see to it that it gets sent to another account of your choice, but it will not accumulate on the AIX machines.
Note: PCS is in the process of evaluating different strategies for increasing both homespace and groupspace on the Glue'ed NSCP II systems. It is hoped that this hardware will be in place in early 2002 with possible production use of this additional disk space sometime shortly thereafter.
Several NSCP-I (AIX) machines were broken into. It is believed to have been through a bug in the telnet daemon process. Unfortunately, no patch is available for the current OS level. As such, incoming telnet service has been disabled on that cluster indefinitely.
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