INews Newsletter - Apr 10, 1998
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* * * I N e w s * * *
A publication of Internet Nebraska, composed and distributed by
* * * manager@inetnebr.com * * *
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Volume 1, Number 9 April 10, 1998
Welcome to another issue of INews, Internet Nebraska's customer newsletter.
This biweekly newsletter communicates service bulletins, announcements and
other useful information to our customers. Please let us know what you think
of it.
In this issue: Maintenance, Always Maintenance
Look Me Up
Getting from Here to There
mIRC Worm
Home page Advertisement
*** Upgrades Upon Us ***
At 1:00 a.m. this Wednesday morning, April 15, IN staff will be performing a
number of system maintenance chores. None of these should prevent anyone from
getting online more than about 15 minutes, and they will be well worth it.
Specifically, we will be upgrading our digital modems to the V.90 standard.
This will allow any of you with K56Flex modems who have upgraded to V.90 to
enjoy 56K connectivity to our Lincoln POP. If you have a K56Flex modem still
in need of upgrade, check the literature which accompanied it for details, or
visit one of the sites mentioned in the 2/13/98 INews issue which is online at
http://www.inetnebr.com/inews .
Also mentioned in that issue are the reasons for your probably getting busy
signals during the evening when trying to dial the 420-4505 group for 56K and
ISDN service. We're still waiting for Aliant to have installed the equipment
required to service our order for more PRI channels.
Those of you with x2 modems will want to go get the free upgrade to V.90
eventually. When Aliant provides us with another bundle of digital lines, we
will be putting some equipment on the line that x2 users will want to have
upgraded to V.90 for. We will write at length on how to do this in an upcoming
INews, so x2 users needn't worry about this yet.
The V.90 upgrade will take approximately half an hour, affecting four modems at
a time, and will be of no inconvenience to anyone not dialing 420-4505 to get
online. We will also be a performing a file system check on the authentication
server, which will mean that loggers-in to falcon will be kicked off for a few
minutes, and no one will be able to start a fresh dial-up connection. Those
who have a PPP session going at the time won't notice a thing.
Finally, we will be upgrading the software on more than half our terminal
servers. Terminal servers are boxes to which our regular 33.6 modems hook up.
When the upgrade to a particular box begins, the users dialed into it will be
disconnected and unable to reconnect to it for about 5 minutes. Trying to
reconnect may, however, result in a successful connection to a different
terminal server.
No frame-relay connections will be affected at by any of this work, unless
DNS queries of falcon are needed during the file system check.
We realize many of you work and play on the Internet well into the night, and
so we will hurry this along as much as possible. We think it important to keep
you apprised of this kind of work, and we know that our network will function
better on a day-to-day basis because of it. We appreciate your patience, and
welcome your follow-up questions.
*** White Pages ***
If you want to track down an old friend (or an old enemy, for that
matter), try one of the many on-line "white pages" directories. Several
of them are collected on the Internet Nebraska Search page, including:
Four11 ( http://www.four11.com ): This is the white pages directory used by
Yahoo, and is probably the most popular and easy to use of the bunch.
Bigfoot ( http://www.bigfoot.com ): Claims to be "the Internet's largest, most
accurate collection of e-mail addresses and white-page listings." The "bigfoot
theme" is a little cute for our tastes, but it gets the job done well enough.
Both Four11 and Bigfoot do a good job looking up email addresses and phone
numbers, and do it in a pretty straight-forward way. Perhaps more interesting
is AnyWho ( http://www.anywho.com ), which will not only look up a person's
email address and phone number, but also does "reverse-lookups." Just enter a
phone number and it will display the name and address (if available) of the
person associated with that phone number. Even more fun is the "street
proximity" feature: If an address is listed, click on it, and it will show the
names and addresses of your subject's neighbors, as well as a map of the
neighborhood.
If you don't find the results you're looking for with these directories,
there are several others on the Internet Nebraska Search page and
elsewhere on the World Wide Web.
*** Traceroute ***
[This is the second in a two part series on basic Internet diagnostic
tools. You can find the first part (which covers ping) in the INews
archive at http://www.inetnebr.com/inews/viewnews.cgi?issue=19980327 ]
Traceroute is a utility that lets you see the path that traffic is taking
from your computer to another site on the Internet, and is quite useful
in determining where Internet problems lie.
Traceroute is available for nearly all operating systems. It is included
with Windows 95/NT and most flavors of UNIX. WhatRoute, a Macintosh
traceroute program with tons of extra goodies, is available from:
http://www.inetnebr.com/software/mac/whatroute-150b10-fat.hqx
Special thanks to Tobias Boyd for turning us on to such a groovy Macintosh
traceroute program.
Since most of our customers connect with Windows 95/NT, we'll cover that
version of traceroute in depth. Traceroute on other platforms works
similarly.
As with ping, usage is simple. Pull up a MS-DOS Prompt (Command prompt in
Windows 95) and enter the tracert command, followed by the site you wish
trace to:
C:\>tracert www.yahoo.com
Tracing route to www10.yahoo.com [204.71.200.75]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms <10 ms 10 ms lin-router2.inetnebr.com [199.184.119.13]
2 10 ms 30 ms 10 ms lnk5-s0n1.cp.verio.net [199.240.138.201]
3 <10 ms 20 ms 10 ms lnk-fa400.cp.verio.net [198.247.225.1]
4 20 ms 30 ms 20 ms sl-gw4-kc-10-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.131.1]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms sl-bb3-kc-6-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.224.20.7]
6 30 ms 50 ms 40 ms sl-bb3-fw-1-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.77]
7 30 ms 40 ms 21 ms 144.232.1.217
8 50 ms 70 ms 60 ms sl-bb11-stk-4-1-155M.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.70]
9 70 ms 70 ms 71 ms sl-bb21-stk-9-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.4.105]
10 80 ms 60 ms 70 ms sl-bb21-stk-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.4.82]
11 80 ms 90 ms 80 ms isi-border2-hssi4-0--T3.sprintlink.net [144.228.147.10]
12 51 ms 60 ms 70 ms fe1-1.cr2.SNV.globalcenter.net [206.251.7.38]
13 71 ms 60 ms 70 ms www10.yahoo.com [204.71.200.75]
Trace complete.
What is shown is a step-by-step representation of the path taken by information
travelling from one site to another. In this case, data travels out over
our router, through Verio's network, through Sprintlink's backbone, through
Global Center (Yahoo's provider) and to a web server at Yahoo. It also
shows how long each step or "hop" takes. The usefulness of this tool
is obvious. If you are having difficulty reaching a site, traceroute can
show you where the problem lies.
C:\>tracert nothing.inetnebr.com
Tracing route to nothing.inetnebr.com [206.222.223.3]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms <10 ms 10 ms lin-router2.inetnebr.com [199.184.119.13]
2 20 ms 10 ms 20 ms oma-router.inetnebr.com [206.222.220.1]
3 * * * Request timed out.
4 * * * Request timed out.
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 ^C
The asterisks (*) mean that data didn't return from the target machine.
They can indicate poor connectivity and packet loss, or they can (as in
this case) indicate that a machine is unreachable. You can see that it
goes from out Lincoln office, to our Omaha router, and then stops. We
can see the problem here lies in Internet Nebraska's Omaha location, and
so we know who to blame. ;^)
One of the most interesting side effects of traceroute is that you can often
tell where a site is located by doing a traceroute. Many network providers
name their routers with the city or location that router is in. Take for
example a traceroute to Twentieth Century Fox Home Video (www.tcfhe.com)
C:\>tracert www.foxhome.com
Tracing route to www.tcfhe.com [192.215.8.30]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms lin-router2.inetnebr.com [199.184.119.13]
2 10 ms 20 ms 10 ms lnk5-s1n10.cp.verio.net [199.240.138.165]
3 90 ms 40 ms 40 ms lnk-fa400.cp.verio.net [198.247.225.1]
4 10 ms 10 ms 30 ms sl-gw4-kc-10-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.131.1]
5 40 ms 30 ms 40 ms sl-bb3-kc-6-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.224.20.7]
6 50 ms 40 ms 30 ms sl-bb3-fw-1-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.77]
7 50 ms 30 ms 40 ms sl-bb4-fw-1-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.178]
8 81 ms 110 ms 50 ms h12-0.dfw-bb1.cerf.net [134.24.32.45]
9 50 ms 41 ms 60 ms atm0-0.chi-bb2.cerf.net [134.24.46.142]
10 40 ms 50 ms 60 ms h1-0-0.chi-bb1.cerf.net [134.24.46.101]
11 90 ms 100 ms 100 ms atm9-0.phl-bb1.cerf.net [134.24.46.165]
12 110 ms 120 ms 91 ms atm6-0-155M.nyc-bb1.cerf.net [134.24.46.169]
13 250 ms 111 ms 110 ms atm9-0-3-155M.san-bb1.cerf.net [134.24.29.45]
14 120 ms 121 ms 100 ms atm8-0-155M.san-bb3.cerf.net [134.24.32.5]
15 100 ms 100 ms 111 ms foxhome2.web.cerf.net [192.215.8.30]
Trace complete.
You can see traffic goes from Lincoln, to Kansas City, to Fort Worth, to
Chicago, to Philadelphia, to New York City, to San Francisco. What a
convoluted path, but eventually ending up in the Bay Area, home of
Twentieth Century Fox.
Although we're not able to cover every aspect of traceroute (we could write
an entire book on the subject), the basics we've shown should cover most
simple diagnostic needs.
*** mIRC Vulnerability ***
We have a quite a few IRC users on the system, so we thought we'd pass this
along from the NASIRC Bulletin B-98-32 of April 7. It is nothing to worry much
about, and if you don't know what IRC is, you can ignore this completely.
> PROBLEM
>
> NASIRC has received recent reports concerning a vulnerability in
> mIRC, a popular IRC (Internet Relay Chat) program. A number of
> Worms that infect the mIRC script language have surfaced. These
> Worms overwrite the SCRIPT.INI file, found in the mIRC program
> directory, where it can be executed automatically every time the
> mIRC program is executed. (The mIRC script language enables mIRC
> to execute commands automatically as well as trigger commands to
> be executed when predefined words are typed during the chat.)
>
> The Worms vary slightly, but all are transferred via DCC to the
> remote users hard drive. (DCC stands for Direct Client to Client.
> It allows direct connections between two computers, bypassing the
> IRC server. It can be used either for sending and receiving files
> or talking.) The most common Worm called "Simsalapim" transfers
> the SCRIPT.INI file via DCC to the remote user. If the AUTOGET
> feature is not disabled, the remote user will be prompted to Get,
> Cancel, or Ignore the transfer. If the transfer is accepted the
> remote system then becomes infected. Most of the damages caused
> by these programs are simple annoyances. No real system/OS damage
> has been reported to date.
>
>
> ACTION
>
> There are a number of ways to protect your system from becoming
> infected. (NOTE: Performing any/all of the recommended actions
> listed below will protect your system against infection.)
>
> - Disable the mIRC AUTOGET feature.
>
> - Do not accept file transfers from unknown sources. Never accept a
> SCRIPT.INI file.
>
> - Upgrade to the latest version of mIRC at http://www.mirc.co.uk./
*** Advertise on Our Home Pages ***
What better way to advertise your business than on a Web page that is
seen tens of thousands of time every month? None, if you're paying as
little as we charge for it! Give us a call at our office, 434-8680, and
ask how you can reserve banner spots on some of the hottest URL's in the
state, including our new search, kids, news, and restaurant pages. The
following businesses did, and we recommend them highly.
Computer Renaissance of Lincoln
Computer Renaissance. The new store
with the used computer equipment.
Quality, brand name computer
equipment at prices lower than you'll
find anywhere. Computer Renaissance
is where you can buy a computer, sell
your used one or upgrade to a computer
that's more your speed.
-- http://www.crlincoln.com/
MicroAge Lincoln
MicroAge Lincoln is a full service computer
partner to the Lincoln, Nebraska area.
We offer business clients a full range of
services, including: software training,
network design and support, hardware repair,
and product sales. Whether you are
interested in computer training for yourself,
or you are a business that needs a network,
team up with MicroAge. We are committed to
your success.
-- http://www.microagelnk.com/index2.html
The Capital Soccer Association
Capital Soccer Association specializes in
teaching soccer. However we recognize that
soccer, or any other youth sport is merely
one tool in the development of a young
child. Teamwork and sportsmanship through
knowledge and proficiency of the game are
our main goals.
-- http://www.capitalsoccer.com/
Schaefer's TV & Appliance center
Schaefer's is an independently owned and
operated television, appliance, and home
theater retailer in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Born out of a small corner drugstore four
decades ago, Schaefer's TV & Appliance is a
22,000 square-foot "superstore" today,
specializing in commercial/professional-grade
appliances, whole house sound systems, home
theater and central vacuum systems. The
success of Schaefer's is key to repeat
business. If a customer happens to have a
problem with a product, Schaefer's will bend
over backwards to get it solved. Our service
center is the largest in the city, and has been
voted Lincoln's #1 servicer for 10 years in a
row! A knowledgeable sales staff, express
delivery, easy financing, and our customer
service representatives are just a few of the
ways in which we at Schaefer's distinguish
ourselves from the rest. Stop by our showroom
at 48th and R in Lincoln, or call us at
402-464-8888, and see for yourself.
-- http://www.schaeferstv.com/index2.htm
Internet Nebraska System Manager - manager@inetnebr.com