Core Services

Author: doachs

  • Wireless Update

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    doachs

    In our pursuit to ever increase our wireless coverage on campus, we have added an access point to Confer. Almost all of the 3rd floor of Confer and Vickner is covered well. On the second floor the middle 1/3 of the combined building is well covered. And on the 1st floor the very middle section…

  • Email Certificates

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    doachs

    I had a couple of requests last night about how to get a certificate for use with email such that you can digitally sign messages and send encrypted email. For the past few years I have been using a free personal email certificate from thawte. For more information take a look at Thawte’s personal email…

  • Webmail prefs change

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    doachs

    I have made a minor change to the default preferences for Webmail. Now the first time you log into webmail on or after the 1st of a month, you will get a screen that asks you if you want to perform maintenance on your account and then there are check boxes for a few things.…

  • Sohre Network

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    doachs

    The upgrade of networking hardware in Sohre apparently went smoothly. It took us about 3 hours to swap out the old hardware with the new. As far as I know, no comlaints. However as students come back from break later tonight and tomorrow, we’ll see how things go. Hopefully everyone will notice a better/faster network.

  • Network upgrade for Sohre planned

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    doachs

    If all goes well, we are planning on swapping out the very old 10 megabit hubs that connect all the dorm rooms together in Sohre Hall. We will replace them with nice new 10/100 switches that have gigabit uplink ports. We also plan on upgrading the dorms 100 megabit connection to a gigabit connection at…

  • IRC Bots

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    doachs

    There are more and more machines on campus infected by “IRC bots” every day. In an effort to stop them we began blocking all IRC traffic on the default IRC port of 6667 back in January. That has worked quite well, however the bots are getting smarter and using many other ports. In an effort…

  • Finally upgraded to SpamAssin 3

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    doachs

    Well, after about a week of testing SpamAssassin 3.0, I decided I was ready to transition the college to the lastest version. In the past week I have been very happy with the way the new version is working. My only complaint is that they reduced the score for BAYES_99 to 1.9 instead of the…

  • Spamassassin 3

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    doachs

    I am very excited to see that spamassassin 3 was released today. So far I have it installed on a test system and am having my email filtered through it. So far so good. Its only been filtering for 2 hours now, but it has already done a perfect job determining what is spam and…

  • Webmail

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    doachs

    As anyone who has used webmail.gac.edu lately knows, it has been slow. Especially during peak usage times (10:00am-10:30am). I think that I have found the reason things were running so slowly. The database that holds user preferences was slowing everything down. The webmail software (Horde) was making too may queries, and more importantly, too many…

  • More about viruses

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    doachs

    If you are wondering what happened to our network last week, here is a very good article from another college/university about an almost identical infection. http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/its/security/advisories/BGSU2004-08-27.html