When dialing in via our prairiedog service, it is very important that you keep your home system clean (free of viruses, up-to-date on operating system patches). Because all our dial-in users enter the internet via prairiedog, any misbehavior by a home system shows up on the internet as misbehavior by prairiedog. When other systems stop accepting packets from prairiedog, all users of prairiedog are negatively affected. In fact, this very thing happened on 4 May 2004. CCIT shut down prairiedog, and all our users lost dial-up for a day. Below is the e-mail we sent out when service was restored.
Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 15:07:26 -0700 From: system@math.arizona.edu To: all@math.arizona.edu Subject: Important Notice: Our Dial-up Service (prairiedog) Greetings, If you dial in to our system (prairiedog) from home, you may have noticed it was unavailable yesterday. It appears at least one of our 64 regular dial-in users has an infected computer at home: CCIT doesn't see those individual users---they only see prairiedog, saw the virus/worm, and shut down all network access to prairiedog. In other words, one bad apple really can spoil the barrel. We worked with CCIT last night to restore service, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, we request that all users verify their home computer's virus protection (e.g., Sophos) is up-to-date, and that also your operating system is up-to-date with the latest patches. (E.g., if you're running Windows, go to "Windows Update".) We are here to help you. You can run Sophos for free at home and have it automatically update against campus servers. You can set Windows Update to automatically keep your system up-to-date. If you think your computer may be the source of our prairiedog troubles, and you are not sure what to do about that, please contact system@math.arizona.edu -- we'll gladly help you fix the potential problem. (We are certain the other 63 users of prairiedog appreciate your diligence!) Thanks for your cooperation. Bob Borys P.S.: We did have to make some changes to prairiedog to obtain CCIT's cooperation. If you discover something that worked two days ago but no longer works, please send a note to system@math.arizona.edu.
