------------------- NCF FreePlan Status ------------------- Ian D. Allen Tue Oct 15 1996 This document gives the current status of the following five major technical components of the NCF FreePlan: FreeNet (FreePort) The Classic, text-only, menu-based community network FreeMail Internet-based "offline" mail reading/writing Dial-up mail service using PPP FreePage Organization WWW home pages NCF member WWW home pages FreePlace Internet-based public cyber-services: NNTP access to ncf.* news Full text indexing and searching FreeWeb Dial-up graphical access to the Internet Access methods Graphical access to NCF (mail, news, Web content) Graphical access to the Internet Details ------- Software to support the NCF Challenge Program was installed. New this month was programming designed to avoid bothering recent (past 6 months) NCF donors. The lack of an accurate and timely donation database makes this kind of project awkward. Angela was trained in the use of the NCF Cashometer. Aliases and scripts to support the NCF Awareness Survey were installed this month. The first menu visible to all dial-in users changed this month, for the first time in NCF's history. In preparation for PPP services, a set of three choices is now available before a user enters his/her userid and password. The design of the bilingual menu was a collaborative effort between staff and many volunteers in the system-design news group. Pat Drummond and Don McCallum are getting crash on-the-job training doing the documentation for the upcoming FreePlan services. Roy and Ian have been helping with the technical details; they have been writing menus and documents that explain things for NCF members. Changes in the hourly Unix NIS password rebuild were installed to avoid needlessly rebuilding the large password file each hour and to prepare for propagation of password updates to the Netscape Mail Sever. The account renewal system is designed and being implemented. Rather than take time to install a new database, a new field, "Renewal Date", is being added to the existing NCF registration software. Some updated registration and online statistics are available that show the changes in unique online users over the past 18 months: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/ ip/freenet/ops/team/tech-dir/stats/uniqueUserWeekly.gif Roy is putting the finishing touches on authentication modifications that permit NCF to verify the true sender of email submitted via the upcoming NCF PPP service. The NCF userid and PPP port information will be available in the header of messages received through PPP. Most mail readers do not display this information, so only people who suspect forgeries and go looking at the mail header will know. The Netscape "Suite Spot" set of servers arrived. It contained CDROMs and manuals for the Mail, News, Proxy, and Enterprise servers, though both the Mail and News servers were an old release. The manuals will be helpful. Home pages have been moved into private directories in member accounts. A "go homepage" menu collects documentation and tools for working with Home Pages. NCF was notified that it had been "scanned" for security weaknesses by a compromised site on the Internet. The scanning is usually a precursor to an Internet attack. No special action is being taken; we have many of the standard defences in place and our backup tapes are good. We are being extra vigilant about unusual system activity. The Netscape Mail Server failed to load NCF's 59,000 userids due to internal inefficiencies in its method of loading its databases. We uploaded a public-domain mail server (IMAPD) to act as a temporary replacement; but, it had insufficient built-in security provisions. Email exchanged with the program's current author failed to resolve the problem. A user on one of the Netscape news groups mentioned how he had circumvented the Netscape problem by loading the databases manually. Though he was not able to give us his scripts, we uploaded and installed the Berkeley DB database library, decoded the Netscape database format, and were able to load our 59,000 accounts. The load took about 6 hours (on an IPC machine). Work continues on minimally emulating the Netscape account add/modify software to enable us to use the Netscape Mail server. The Netscape LDAP Directory server will eventually be used by all Netscape servers to handle accounts and authentication. (This common directory format was a key factor in our decision to use the Netscape software suite.) The beta test of this server was uploaded to NCF and tested. It handled all 59,000 NCF accounts. We await the release of Netscape WWW, News, and Mail servers that use LDAP. We have found several bugs in the Netscape Enterprise server, some of which are security holes. We've submitted descriptions of the bugs to Netscape. Initial use of "one button publish" by some IPs is eliciting comments regarding the Netscape Enterprise server being too slow. We'll continue to investigate; the problem may be network performance and not a server problem. Paul Tomblin reconciled NCF's list of news groups with a semi-official list on UUNET. The resulting removal of many popular Usenet news groups caused some disruption. The eventual return of the missing news groups failed due to incorrect article numbering. Paul has fixed all this, and he'll be more gentle in future. The NCF account creation software had some unexplained failures this month, possibly due to high NFS traffic on our local network or due to a new version of the Perl scripting program. Minor changes to the accounting scripts have apparently fixed the problems. Our old Annex Three terminal servers proved unable to handle the load of the filter rules added to implement PPP this month. The rules were removed after users complained of high character latencies. We are now testing Roy's office PC as a IP filter machine. The new racks of 9600 bps modems installed last month are not working well. Members are having problems connecting to them, and dozens of modems are getting left in an unusable state every week, requiring constant vigilance by our modem administrator Don McCallum and constant hands-on attention from either Roy or Carleton staff. We plan to replace 64 of these flakey modems with our 64 USR Sportster modems as soon as possible. We hope that 32 of the best remaining 9600 bps modems will tide us over until we can replace them, too. The new login sequence designed to give greater prominence to the line sponsorship message is causing member confusion and complaints. We'll redesign and simplify it once FreePlan is up and running. Upcoming: -------- The software to support NCF account renewals will be completed by October 17; wording of the associated menus and announcements will be done in parallel. The Netscape Mail server authentication database will be integrated with the NCF accounting software this week and reloaded in preparation for PPP access. If the PC IP routing filter works as expected, PPP will be possible for NCF members as early as Friday (October 18) or early Saturday. NCF may wish to wait until both the Mail, News, and Proxy servers are fully functional before enabling the PPP service, to avoid member complaints about inaccessible NCF services or Internet URLs. -- ** Lisa K. Donnelly, M.B.A., Executive Director ** * National Capital FreeNet/Libertel de la Capitale nationale * Telecommunities Canada, Board of Directors (613) 241-9554 voice & fax (613) 241-2477