IRIS

Thanks to everyone who attended the EECS Computing Town Hall meeting on Wednesday, February 21. The slides from that meeting are now available for download.

Attachment:  townhall_meeting_2-21-2007.ppt

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, March 13, 2007.

HERMES, PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will be down for patching Wednesday, March 14, from 3:00p-5:00p.

macserver.eecs.berkeley.edu, which hosts the Mac software warehouse,
will be down for maintenance at this time as well.

The IRIS website and the IRIS list server (lists.eecs) will be unavailable from 12:00p.m. to 12:30p.m. on March 8, 2007 due to operating system patching.

[Read more…] about IRIS Website and lists.eecs Will Be Unavailable Briefly on Thursday, Mar 8, 2007 Due to Patching

Due to a problem with cooling water and a leak to pipes for the A/C that feeds the 3rd floor closet, the closest became over temperature, causing a failure on at least one switch this morning. This resulted in connectivity issues on the 3rd floor wired net and wireless outages on the 2nd and 3rd floors (and part of the 1st floor) of Cory. We have reset one switch and will be monitoring the situation. We are trying to use fans and spot cooling to bring the temperature down until the leak is repaired and normal cooling can be restored.

On Tuesday, March 5th, 2007, IDSG will place a new startup script on the
EECS Windows domain. The script updates Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server
hosts for the new Daylight Saving Time start and end dates. To get the
update, Windows 2000 hosts in the EECS domain will just need to reboot.

This script is for English language hosts only. If your 2000 host is
some other language you will need to manually update. See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387/en-us for instructions. Click on “Method 2: Change the time zone settings on a single computer”.

If you are using Windows XP or better and have been keeping up with the
Microsoft patches, your host is already updated. This startup script
will not affect your host.

macserver.eecs.berkeley.edu, which hosts the Mac software warehouse, will be down for maintenance tomorrow (Thursday, February 22) from 3pm – 4pm.

We are currently seeing a problem with AirBears Wireless in EECS. It seems that clients are unable to get DHCP leases on AirBears. Other EECS WLANs are not impacted. IS&T has been contacted.
[Read more…] about AirBears connectivity issues

Dear EECS Community,

Please join us for the 2007 EECS IT Town Hall meeting, sponsored by IRIS. This will be held in Woz Lounge in Soda Hall on Feb. 21st, from 1:30 to 3:30pm.

This is a good opportunity to meet all of the EECS IT Staff, learn about upcoming changes and new deployments. It’s also a great time to ask any IT related questions and give feedback.

There will be refreshments and a limited number of Star Wars themed candy (Pez) dispensers provided.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Eric Fraser
EECS Director of IT

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

https://security.berkeley.edu/node/373

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).

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007.

HERMES, PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will be down for patching Wednesday,
February 14th, 2007, from 3:00p to 5:00p.

macserver.eecs.berkeley.edu, which hosts the Mac software warehouse,
will be down for maintenance at this time as well.