August 2002 - NZNOG - lists.nznog.org

Peering
by Matt Camp 15 Aug '02

15 Aug '02

Beloved Peers, Update to the TelstraClear Domestic Peering Prefix-List Please remove: 202.0.32.0/20 le 24 202.0.50.0/24 Please add: 202.0.32.0/19 le 24 202.37.137.0/24 Full list attached.

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FW: Another anti-spam tool
by Gordon Smith 14 Aug '02

14 Aug '02

Just a heads-up for everyone - just found a customer using a nasty little tool called spamstalker. Not only does it forge headers when the user bounces messages, it also attempts a sendmail HELO buffer overflow exploit. It's distributed out of the U.S. Needless to say, we'll be contacting the author... Cheers, Gordon Smith CCNA Network Operations Manager MoreNet Ltd - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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RE: Fwd: Outage in Wellington
by Richard Naylor 14 Aug '02

14 Aug '02

At 04:41 p.m. 05/08/2002 +1200, Peter Mott wrote: >Are you saying that CityLink does not have UPS and autostart generator >on-site to run the whole works for at least 8 hours? I wondered when this would come up. CityLink has a different architecture and there is no "central office". Switching centers have ups and generators and smaller buildings just have UPS. But that doesn't guarantee anything. Y2k showed up a lot of "interesting effects" and I'm sure they haven't all been rectified. Having a geny in the building doesn't mean its tested and feeds everywhere you think it does. BTW - the building people mentioned this was their first outage in 7 years. In the case of this morning, we (and the other telcos in the room) run off the local power and took a short hit of around 15 minutes, despite a local outage measured in hours. We also elected to go to geny due to the switching issues the power boys were facing. We also supplied power to other tennants who had a need. If you have ever closed an 11kV switch on a fault in a metro ring main sub, you will understand why we made that decision. "did the earth move for you ?" is being polite. "Sudden suntans", stuck HT gloves, etc sometimes result. (aside: HT gloves come up to your elbow, when they are "stuck" it means they've melted to something, normally the switch handle or the wall on the other side of the room from where you were not so long ago.) Now whats really interesting is that after my earlier post, an ISP contacted me to see if the outage in Courtenay Place was the cause of two dropped pings in Thorndon. He mentioned that some of todays NZNOG discussion was already posted in a security list (?) being sent around, probably misquoted. My concern is that as a list we share fairly openly about incidents mixed with a degree of good humour and frequent light relief. If an unknowing party is quoting the list, then we need a closed list or reduce the chatter or even the info conveyed. Summary - this mornings outage wasn't a simple - NO POWER. It was complex, with enough other indicators to fool experienced (power) operators. They actually did a good job. rich richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Re: Domainz falling prey to spambots?
by Saby Singh 12 Aug '02

12 Aug '02

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RE: DNS problems
by Tim John 11 Aug '02

11 Aug '02

Chris, I appreciate your concern, but I should have mentioned - and state for the record - that this name server issue is solely with the machine hosting the DRS and nothing to do with the .nz DNS. I don't want anyone thinking that the 'real' name servers are effected by this. Tim -----Original Message----- From: Chris Wedgwood [mailto:cw(a)f00f.org] Sent: Thursday, 8 August 2002 4:02 p.m. To: Tim John Cc: 'nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz' Subject: Re: DNS problems On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 02:42:38PM +1200, Tim John wrote: The mail queue on the server is unable to resolve the names for the relevant name servers when sending the notification mail. Why is this? It's troubling Domainz of all people are having DNS issues. --cw DISCLAIMER: The content of this email is confidential and may contain legally privileged information intended only for the individual or entity named above. Access to this message by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the intended recipient, please be advised that the use, distribution and publication of the above information is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please contact Domainz by returning the email and destroying the original. Thank you. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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latency
by Michael Newbery 11 Aug '02

11 Aug '02

It's Friday... I have been considering a suitable measure for IP latency. Inspired by the knowledge that at least one network protocol uses micro-fortnights as a unit (RFC 995), I respectfully offer the following modest proposal for consideration. We typically measure latency in msec, which is just so mundane and last millennium. Given that the speed of light is a constant, we can easily map between time and distance with the simple formula d=ct. Since our proposed new unit is purely nominal, we will use the speed of light in vacuo. In this post-modern world, why not use a tried and true, human centered measure. I like the cubit. It has stood the test of time, plus it has the word 'bit' in it. Now, typical values of latency produce a number of cubits that is rather large, so for most networks we will need to scale up the the mega-cubit (Mcubit). Those of us firmly wedded to powers of two may prefer the IEC standard nomenclature for powers of two prefixes of MiCubit (pronounced mebicubit). Which leads to the observation that the current distance from my workstation to Xtra is 3.47Mcubits, Cisco is 23Mcubits away, www.theregister.com is 34Mcubits away, and I am only 0.45 mebicubits from Paradise. Draw what comfort you may from this. -- Michael Newbery IP Architect TelstraClear Limited - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Appreciation !
by Tim John 11 Aug '02

11 Aug '02

Hi Lin, Thank you for those words of reason; they are like a ray of light through the shadows. The DRS and all that went on at it's launch was before my time. I inherited the system when I started about 15 months ago and I believe we've made some good changes since then to make the system more reliable and hopefully a little better to work with. As we will be the 'stabilising registrar' under the SRS, Domainz have had to do some significant work to meet the needs of a shared environment. We will be introducing a new finance application in the next few weeks that will enable a large chunk of the existing system to be removed, thus giving an improvement in performance to what's left of the DRS. In my personal view, Domainz are in a 'strange' place at the moment. We are paying for the registry part of the existing system to be rebuilt and separated from us. We will be the guinea-pigs for the new environment and we are under the constant threat from our shareholders who are considering closing Domainz down. Quite frankly, it seems a lose/lose situation for us and which-ever way you look, we are bound to get a slamming once again. It's not a favourable spot for a Domainz (or any other) employee to be in ! Aside from the past, present and future politics of Domainz <groan>, I have made it my responsibility to try and provide the best system we can to our customers. I don't - to quote - 'hate the DRS', but I can assure you that I get as frustrated as everybody else from time to time. The DRS is all we've got at the moment, so we've got to try and make the most of it. If I hear of issues that could effect a wide audience of users, I want to get them fixed as soon as possible - as any IT Professional would. I appreciate that a lot of people have been burned in the past with the DRS and there is a lot of resentment out there (cue Peter M. :>) for both the system and some of the people involved in setting it up. My colleague Chris and I (IT Dept.) are simply trying to provide a level of service that is as good as possible given the tools we've got. Again, in my personal opinion, I am looking forward to the SRS and hope that Domainz can take on a commercial role in the future; I'd love to be involved in the next saga of the Company. There are some good people here who are passionate about their jobs, even under the continuing negativity of the DRS. Thanks again, Lin. My final point is that I enjoy working 'with' people and certainly not 'against' them. It's just not my style. Cheers, Tim -----Original Message----- From: Lin Nah [mailto:lin(a)darkmere.gen.nz] Sent: Sunday, 11 August 2002 11:49 p.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: RE: DNS problems HI all While at the SRS information meeting the day before the nznog conference, I noticed the something that I am observing now. I am myself guilty of it. The negative opinion and suspicion we have of Domainz and their intentions is still there. I am not surprised by it. I myself (at the meeting) were asking questions to ensure the same thing didn't occur again. However I think we have to realise that many of the technical and even management of Domainz were not around or had nothing to do with the specification and implementation of the system forced on us on 1 May 2000. The current CEO is definitely different from POB. They have to live with it as we do until such time the new SRS is up and going. We all know the system is fubar'd. From what I gather they will decide at that point what to do with the DRS but until such time, they have to keep it going. Some of you met Tim John at the nznog conference. It was a pity though Derek Locke, the CEO, was registered for the conference and I did see him around one day, didn't introduce himself to those of you there so you could ask him questions about the transition from monopoly to SRS. In fact I was a bit annoyed when I found out about the SRS briefing that it wasn't held at the conference, to give some of you (network operators) an idea of what they were planning to accomplish with it. Why am I writing this? I think we should perhaps try to be helpful to people like Tim and other technical staff at domainz. I am sure they secretly hate it (the DRS) as much as we do. We know there are holes to that system. For example this week we hear not all emails went out and there's been no bounces etc. shrug - nothing new to me since I know of quite a few domain holders who never received their notification for renewal or initial invoice. I am not saying I will stop asking questions but I think I will try my best to do in a nicer tone. No we can't tell him about emails we didn't receive since we don't know about them. However if some of you have made changes to your domain, you should usually get an email about it. Similarly if you know your domain is due for renewal, they usually send renewal email reminders. So if you have received an invoice without a reminder email, that could be an indication why. regards Lin Footnote for those interested in the SRS: >From what I gather the SRS goes ahead on 1 Sept. At that point in time Domainz will be the sole registrar to the new registry. Once it is deemed stable etc, other registrars will be added on. I believe the deadline for that is 1 December 2002. They want a buffer period so they have an option to go back if things go horribly wrong. I believe once they start having other registrars it is a point of no return. Domainz has promissed to help in the transition process. Yes they have to help their competitors by helping with the transfer of domains to those registrars. Also the software for the SRS is open source. All interested registrars can either develop their own system or use the code developed. For the former, the technical specs have been placed online as well. There were lots more discussed at the meeting which went overtime ( I did think they were too optimistic that 2 hours was enough) Anyway if you want to know more, I suggest going to www.dnc.org.nz There's info there. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog DISCLAIMER: The content of this email is confidential and may contain legally privileged information intended only for the individual or entity named above. Access to this message by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the intended recipient, please be advised that the use, distribution and publication of the above information is prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please contact Domainz by returning the email and destroying the original. Thank you. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Very cool Internet appliance
by Juha Saarinen 08 Aug '02

08 Aug '02

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/review/2/2/1600.html Definitely something NZ ISPs should consider reselling! Wonder if you could use MRTG to graph the beer temperature/flow etc? -- Juha Saarinen - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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RE: Newsfeed Services
by Arjen De Landgraaf 08 Aug '02

08 Aug '02

E-Secure-IT has a very complete and up-to-date newsfeed in the area of IT security. This is available free on their website (www.e-secure-uit.us) and can be made available to individual ISPs. Arjen de Landgraaf -----Original Message----- From: Tony Wicks [mailto:nzog(a)road.gen.nz] Sent: Friday, 9 August 2002 1:19 p.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: RE: Newsfeed Services TelstraClear will supply newsfeed services to International Internet Wholesale customers, generally at no additional charge. ( delivered over domestic connectivity ). That service is not available to non-wholesale customers. > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > [mailto:owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz]On Behalf Of Donovan Jones > Sent: Thursday, 8 August 2002 1:45 p.m. > To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Subject: Newsfeed Services > > > Given that Telecom will be terminating their Newsfeed service at > the end of > August, we are looking for a new source of usenet news for our customers. > Does anyone else in New Zealand provide Newsfeed services suitable for > an ISP (for a fee of course), or better yet is there anyone in New > Zealand that will provide (for a fee) direct access to a news server by > another ISPs customers. > > Supernews has been suggested as an option but we would obviously prefer > a local feed due to international bandwidth costs. > > Donovan Jones > > - > To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > where the body of your message reads: > unsubscribe nznog > - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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Newsfeed Services
by Donovan Jones 08 Aug '02

08 Aug '02

Given that Telecom will be terminating their Newsfeed service at the end of August, we are looking for a new source of usenet news for our customers. Does anyone else in New Zealand provide Newsfeed services suitable for an ISP (for a fee of course), or better yet is there anyone in New Zealand that will provide (for a fee) direct access to a news server by another ISPs customers. Supernews has been suggested as an option but we would obviously prefer a local feed due to international bandwidth costs. Donovan Jones - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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