July 2001 A. Ahearn Computer Security ----------------- A security meeting attended by programmers from the various telescope projects on Mt. Hopkins was held on June 19th at the Administrative Complex. Ted Groner of the 60-inch telescope project organized the meeting. Ted has agreed to be the security coordinator for the Mt. Hopkins network. He distributed information on how to better secure the individual subnets until the Whipple Observatory installs a firewall computer system sometime in the future. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for early August. A packet-sniffing software application called snort was installed on the IOTA subnet by Ted. It monitors suspicious network activity such as Anonymous FTP attempts, unauthorized login attempts, and portscans. I check the snort message log on a daily basis. It does not appear that we have been hacked since the incidences in May. However, we are portscanned on a daily basis by hosts from all over the world. Ones that scan our subnet one time only are less of a concern than on! ! es that repeatedly monitor our network services. Less secure network services such as FTP and Telnet have been disabled from our computers. Sys-Admin Issues ---------------- There were several unexpected system occurrences that were reported by users. The iota17 host crashed and spontanteously rebooted a number of times. Running the OT seemed to hang processes or cause X Server errors that required a reboot to resolve. Some of the problems may have been caused by running programs on CPUs without sufficient memory. Problems with volumes not properly unmounting caused unexpected problems with the tip window and the IDL license manager. There were periods of several days when the network was extremely slow. Though the results of ping and download tests have clearly documented the poor network performance, we haven't determined yet the cause or solution. OT Work ------- A new version of the OT was installed in June and has subsequently been updated. The latest version of lmtmc software, version 1.3.3, was designed to address some of the slow performance issues which were a major concern during this engineering run. An unresolved issue is why the GPS Clock data stored in shared memory is not what it's expected to be.