Instructional & Research Information Systems
by IRIS Staff
The CNAME imap.EECS.Berkeley.EDU which currently points at the production IMAP server imap4.CS.Berkeley.EDU will be changed to point at a new system that is an IMAP/Webmail multiplexer.
This change will take effect at noon today.
This change should cause no problems; this message is to inform the general public.
by IRIS Staff
Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007.
PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, Dec 12th, at 3:00 am.
HERMES and macserver.eecs will be down for patching and maintenance Wednesday, Dec 12th, from 3:00p-5:00p.
by IRIS Staff
As of 10:30 this morning, I have installed a patched version of code in our firewalls. I have also disabled the TCP-SYN-CHK that can cause some applications to time out (SSH was the most common application noticed). Please send a note to networks@eecs if any unusual behavior is noted across the firewall.
by IRIS Staff
Beginning at 10:30p.m. on Thursday, Nov 29, 2007 the IRIS website and all Sympa mailing lists will be offline for server maintenance.
I will be rebooting the server hosting the IRIS website and the Sympa database in order to apply some operating system patches as well as updating the IRIS website and its configuration.
Mailing lists should only be unavailable for a few minutes while the server reboots, but the IRIS website won’t be available until about midnight.
[Read more…] about IRIS Website, Mailing Lists Offline for Server Maintenance
by IRIS Staff
We have had a switch failure on the 1st floor of Cory that has a number of server and host connections down in that area. It is being repaired and we hope to have it back up soon. Wireless networking in that area is also affected.
[Read more…] about Switch Failure on 1st Floor of Cory
by IRIS Staff
Resolved as of 2007-11-29 08:00:00
by IRIS Staff
Resolved as of 2007-11-28 11:15:00
by IRIS Staff
We’re experiencing slow processing on our spam appliances and email delays as a result of that. We’re working with the vendor to fix this. We apologize for the inconvenience.
[Read more…] about Email Delays
by IRIS Staff
IDSG is looking into the problem, but so far they have not found
anything out of the ordinary.
[Read more…] about Intermittent errors on 3rd floor (Soda Hall)
Please check that your X Window system is secure.
X Windows is a networking and display protocol environment using a GUI
(graphical user interface). Common X Window servers include XFree86
and Xorg in UNIX style systems and Exceed, WinAXE, Cygwin’s Xwin on
Microsoft Windows systems.
In January 2007, it was discovered that there were keystroke logs on a
system at another University containing data from nine systems in
EECS. Eight of the systems were running various versions of the
Microsoft Windows operating system and one was running linux. We must
assume these keystroke logs contained all passwords used on these
hosts as well as all passwords used to connect to other hosts. It is
suspected that all 9 of the systems had insecure X Window Systems.
IRIS advises usng a layered approach to securing your X Window
System. Access to the X server should be controlled. Typically UNIX
style systems by default do control access to the X server, but a user
can overide the default. Typically Exceed on Windows by default allows
any remote host access to the X server; this is a bad thing.
In addition to controlling access to the X server by utilizing proper
configuration of the X Window system and using the related tools
properly, another layer of security can be added. A properly
configured host based firewall blocking unauthorized remote
access to the X server, typically 6000/tcp, is also recommended.
John Kim from the campus SNS (System and Network Security) group has
written a good knowledge base article concerning securing X Window
systems. The article contains details about configuring Exceed, the
Microsoft Windows firewall and the Symantec Client Security firewall at
It is also recommended that X traffic be encrypted for
example through an encrypted ssh tunnel.
If you need further help with securing your X Windows system please
contact your computer support person(s) or the EECS Helpdesk
(help@eecs, 395 Cory 9am-5pm, 313 Soda 10am-5pm, 642-7777).