IRIS

A new Internet Explorer (IE) exploit is being used to compromise
Windows systems. At this time, the only preventative option available
is to use a browser other than IE such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari.
Microsoft has announced it will release an out-of-cycle patch for this
bug tomorrow, December 17. System and Network Security strongly
encourages everyone who uses IE to be sure to apply this patch as soon
as it becomes available.

This article is reposted from IST. The original article is available at
http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/Spring2009/IE-0day

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the
Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Thursday, December 25 to
Sunday, January 4, reopening on Monday, January 5, 2009.

All departmental computing servers will remain on and should be available during
the break, but there will be no staff on site to provide any computing support
or handle any requests. Automatic monitoring systems will alert staff to
critical infrastructure problems, and any such problems will be dealt with on a
best-effort basis. IRIS staff will be taking advantage of the holiday to do
maintenance on some systems which will result in scattered outages, but any such
downtime will be separately announced and posted on the IRIS website.

The EECS Department’s Computing Helpdesk will be closed beginning Monday,
December 22nd, and will reopen on Monday, January 5th. Problem reports can be
left on the Helpdesk voice mail (2-7777) or emailed to help@eecs, but staff may
not receive or reply to these messages until January 5th.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers should
remain online (imail.eecs, inst.eecs, cory.eecs, mamba.eecs and
fileservice.eecs). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor
inst@eecs over the break. If you are unable to contact inst@eecs, you can leave
a message at 643-6141. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to
respond or reply to messages until January 5th.

We recommend that all desktop computers be shutdown during the Energy
Curtailment Period. If your Windows computer needs to stay on during the break,
we recommend that you check with your system administrator to ensure that
Automatic Updates are enabled with the option ‘Automatically download the
updates and install them on the schedule that I specify’, with a daily update
schedule.

Computing support staff will be monitoring their email when possible, so please
use standard email addresses to report any urgent problems. As a reminder:

– Instructional Computing Environment: inst@eecs
– Research / Staff Computing Environment: help@eecs

Enjoy your holiday break!

The new [IRIS Network Policy](https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/30-policies/network-policy/) has been approved by the [Computer, Networking, & Instructional Laboratories](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Comms/#cnil) committee and is effective starting today, December 1, 2008.

This new policy simplifies the rules and consolidates several older documents into a single, concise reference.

Thank you to everyone who submitted comments and participated in the policy review and rewrite.

There is now an RSS feed for IRIS news postings: https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu/news.rss

You can subscribe to this feed in an RSS reader and be automatically notified whenever we post news to the site.

Beginning Tuesday Dec 2nd, there will be some changes to the EECS wireless networks in Soda Hall. We are moving wireless services in Soda to new hardware. Cory Hall will be upgraded soon after, followed by BWRC, HMMB and Sibley Auditorium.

For some months now IDSG has been testing the next generation of WiFi wireless technology, 802.11n. 802.11n is an emerging standard that uses several schemes to increase data throughput 4-6 times over what is possible with 802.11a or 802.11g. To get the full benefit of this new technology, you will need a newer wireless adapter that supports the 802.11n technology. However, even legacy 802.11a/b/g clients will experience better performance because the new Access Points are better at “hearing” client devices. As a consequence, the uplink data rate is higher. At a later date, we will be testing a further enhancement which will hopefully increase throughput to legacy a/b/g clients in the downlink direction as well.

In the past, for 2.4GHz clients, EECS supported only 802.11b (11Mbps) and not 802.11g (54Mbps). We will now support 802.11g in addition to 802.11n at 2.4GHz. Also, two new WLANs are dual band enabled and work with either 2.4GHz or 5GHz clients. The 5GHz band is strongly preferred. Despite having less effective propagation at 5GHz, our dense AP deployment mitigates this shortcoming. On the positive side, 5GHz is a much less crowded band, there is far less noise at this band; with six channels instead of only three that 2.4GHz offers. With more channels available, co-channel interference with other WiFi radios is greatly minimized. Additionally, 5GHz offers the capability of running 40Mhz wide channels instead of the usual 20MHz, increasing throughput capability again. Dual band clients do not always make the best choice of band and we have disabled both the 1Mb/sec and 2Mb/sec data rates at 2.4GHz in an effort to mitigate this. Clients will more often choose 5GHz if they support it. This scheme is used successfully at many enterprises (especially in education) without adverse effects.

With the new hardware, we will announce the following wireless networks:

AirBears

Remains the same (Unencrypted, Calnet web authentication)

EECS

Remains the same (weak WEP encryption, MAC address registration required)

EECS-Guest

Replaces the “Guest” SSID

EECS-Open

Replaces the “EECS-11a” SSID (Unencrypted, EECS web authentication, MAC address registration required)

EECS-Secure

NEW, open for Beta testing (WPA2 encryption, 802.1x authentication w/ EECS Windows credentials, MAC address registration required)