News from PANUG/BizNix - August 14, 2002
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org


NEXT MEETING
PANUG's monthly meeting is this Thursday, August 15. The
meeting starts off at 6:15 pm with pizza, refreshments,
and a Q&A session. The main presentation will be by Ed
Sawicki. Ed will give us the technical details behind his
company's eScrubber service, which provides
fault-tolerance, spam-suppression, failure-notification,
and attachment-handling for email. Customers have their
own mirrored virtual servers and can manage their own
spam-suppression. Typical customers use eScrubber to
protect their Microsoft Exchange servers.

Ed will also give a brief presentation on denial of service
attacks against wireless communications. It's tempting to
take advantage of wireless Ethernet, but you'll be
exposed to problems that don't exist with wired networks.
It's trivial for an ill-funded attacker with minimal skills
to take down an entire wireless network in a local area,
such as a building, as well as point-to-point wireless
links between sites. This vulnerability is in addition to
the problems caused by weak encryption protocols, such as
WEP.


DNS PROBLEMS
A higher than normal number of list members are suffering
DNS problems. Nearly a dozen list members aren't receiving
these messages because of severe problems in their DNS.
We make some effort to contact the DNS administrators to
fix the problems but much of the time the problems don't
get fixed because we have to leave voice mail messages
and never get a return call.

If the problem persists for two months, we figure the
domain is no longer being used and take the email address
out of our list. Note that we make no attempt to fix
problems for addresses like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, etc.
If you suddenly stop receiving these broadcasts, assume
that you're having a problem rather than this list
becoming inactive suddenly.