Brush up on your office skills this summer. NACS offers Office XP hands-on training beginning August 14th. NACS’s Mobile Computer Lab, comprising 16 notebook computers with wireless network connections travel to various rooms for these workshops. For course outlines and registration, see http://www.nacs.uci.edu/training. Classes are between $50 and $90, depending whether the course is a full or half day and a departmental recharge number is required to register.
E-mail change for Cox Subscribers
The popular local broadband ISP, Cox, has made recent changes to how it handles electronic mail. These measures were taken to prevent malicious users from exploiting Cox for Spam or e-mail based network attacks.
Technically speaking, they have blocked port 25 (SMTP) except for Cox subscribers sending mail through Cox’s mail server. This will not have an impact for most subscribers. If you have not already followed Cox’s recommendations for outbound mail, you must reconfigure your mail application to use their server.
This will also affect users who use a laptop both with the Cox service and UCInet and have been able to use the same mail configuration in both places, which is no longer possible.
Cox provides detailed information at: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,7081800~root=cable,ath~mode=flat
Computing Services Conference
The University of California held an annual conference for computing support staff which rotates from campus to campus each year. Hundreds of IT staff gather each year to share problems and solutions.
The 2003 UCCSC conference was held at UCI from August 3-5. The program comprises over 40 technical presentations from staff throughout the UC system. This is a unique opportunity to learn from others, make valuable connections to people in similar roles, and solve problems together.
The keynote speaker was Dr. Larry Smarr, Director of Cal(IT)2. Dr. Smarr spoke on large-scale network initiatives which will have a major impact on the University.
More information can be found at the conference Website: http://www.uccsc.uci.edu
Computing Support Coordinators
Computing Support Coordinator (CSC) is the label often used at UCI for anyone employed by a school or department to provide local computer and network expertise. What do local supporters do?
Local computing and network support staff provide a variety of standard technical services as school and department needs dictate. They may maintain local labs, support administrative, academic, and other applications, maintain local network and e-mail servers, and provide end-user assistance, often including discipline-specific expertise, to faculty, staff and some students.
CSCs are your best first resource when you have a technical problem. NACS supports the CSCs, providing information, managing a mailing list, conducting discussion forums, distributing software, supplying specialized technical information, and fostering communication among CSCs from different departments.
For more information, and a list of CSCs, visit: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/support/csc/csc.html
Windows Security
A recently announced security problem in Windows will not be fixed for users of Windows NT.
Microsoft has issued a security warning for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems. Bulletin MS03-010, dated 26 March 2002, states that this vulnerability could be used by “an attacker … [to] cause the target machine to fail.”
Microsoft does not plan to provide a fix for it on Windows NT 4.0, which is still being used by various departments at UCI. Microsoft says that they have, “extensively investigated an engineering solution for NT 4.0 and found that the Windows NT 4.0 architecture will not support a fix to this issue, now or in the future.”
So, what’s an NT user to do? Microsoft itself recommends placing such systems behind a “firewall which is filtering traffic on Port 135.” Fortunately, NACS has been running a port blockade on this port since November 5, 2002 (more information on the port blockades). This blockade restricts all off-campus systems and Residential Housing computers sending traffic to these ports on campus.
While this keeps UCI users of Windows NT safe from outside attempts to exploit this weakness, it is prudent for departments to develop a migration strategy away from NT, as Microsoft no longer supports NT nor promises to develop security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered.