Archive for the ‘network’ Category
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Last Sunday, Terry Childs, a network administrator employed by the City of San Francisco, was arrested and taken into custody, charged with four counts of computer tampering. He remains in jail, held on US$5 million bail. News reports have depicted a rogue admin taking a network hostage for reasons unknown, but new information from a source close to the situation presents a different picture.
In posts to my blog, I postulated about what might have occurred. Based on the small amount of public information, I guessed that the situation revolved around the network itself, not the data or the servers. A quote from a city official that Cisco was getting involved seemed to back that up, so I assumed that Childs must have locked down the routers and switches that form the FiberWAN network, and nobody but Childs knew the logins. If this were true, then regaining control over those network components would cause some service disruption, but would hardly constitute the “millions of dollars in damages” that city representatives feared, according to news reports.
Apparently, I wasn’t far off the mark. In response to one of by blog posts, a source with direct knowledge of the City of San Francisco’s IT infrastructure and of Childs himself offered to tell me everything he knew about the situation, under condition that he remain anonymous. I agreed, and within an hour, a long e-mail arrived in my in box, painting a very detailed picture of the events. Based on this information, the case of Terry Childs appears to be much more — and much less — than previously reported.
A Man and His Network
It seems that Terry Childs is a very intelligent man. According to my source, Childs holds a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certification, the highest level of certification offered by Cisco. He has worked in the city’s IT department for five years, and during that time has become simply indispensible.
Although Childs was not the head architect for the city’s FiberWAN network, he is the one, and only one, that built the network, and was tasked with handling most of the implementation, including the acquisition, configuration, and installation of all the routers and switches that comprise the network. According to my source’s e-mail, his purview extended only to the network and had nothing to do with servers, databases, or applications:
“Terry’s area of responsibility was purely network. As far as I know (which admittedly is not very far), he did not work on servers, except maybe VoIP servers, AAA servers, and similar things directly related to the administration of the network. My suspicion is that you are right about how he was “monitoring e-mail”; it was probably via a sniffer, IPS, or possibly a spam-filtering/antivirus appliance. But that’s just conjecture on my part.”
Like many network administrators who work in the rarified air of enterprise network architecture and administration, Childs apparently trusted no one but himself with the details of the network, including routing configuration and login information. Again, from the source’s e-mail:
“The routing configuration of the FiberWAN is extremely complex. Probably more so than it ought to be; I sometimes got the feeling that, in order to maintain more centralized control over the routing structure, [Childs] bent some of the rules of MPLS networks and caused problems for himself in terms of maintaining the routing.
“Because the system was so complex (and also because he didn’t involve any of the other network engineers in his unit), Terry was the only person who fully understood the FiberWAN configuration. Therefore, to prevent inadvertent disruption of this admittedly critical network, he locked everyone else out. I know most of the networking equipment … does use centralized AAA, but I get the impression he may have configured the FiberWAN equipment for local authentication only.”
Childs’ attitude toward other administrators is by no means unusual in the IT industry. This is generally due to the fact that admins who are tasked with constructing and maintaining networks of this size and scope care for them like children, and eventually come to believe that no one else could have the knowledge and skills to touch the delicate configurations that form the heart of the network.
Sole Administrator
A key point made in the e-mail is that Childs’ managers and co-workers all knew that he was the only person with administrative access to the network. In fact, it was apparently known and accepted in many levels of the San Francisco IT department. Again, quoting from the e-mail:
“This is where it gets tricky for the prosecution, IMO, because the localized authentication, with Terry as sole administrator, has been in place for months, if not years. His coworkers knew it (my coworkers and I were told many times by Terry’s coworkers, “If your request has anything to do with the FiberWAN, it’ll have to wait for Terry. He’s the only one with access to those routers”). His managers knew it.
Other network engineers for the other departments of the City knew it. And everyone more or less accepted it.
No one wanted the thing to come crashing down because some other network admin put a static route in there and caused a black hole; on the other hand, some of us did ask ourselves, “What if Terry gets hit by a truck?” If a configuration is known and accepted, is that “tampering”?”
My source appears to believe that Childs’ motivation was the antithesis of tampering, and that Childs did everything possible to maintain the integrity of the network, perhaps to a fault:
“He’s very controlling of his networks — especially the FiberWAN. In an MPLS setup, you have “provider edge” (PE) routers and “customer edge” (CE) routers. He controlled both PE and CE, even though our department was the customer; we were only allowed to connect our routers to his CE routers, so we had to extend our routing tables into his equipment and vice versa, rather than tunneling our routing through the MPLS system.”
BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer
Posted on: April 9, 2008
A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.
ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.
Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology at the corporation, has said he believes the cost of network upgrades should be carried by ISPs.
Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, said the BBC should contribute to the cost.
He said the BBC did not understand the issues involved.
‘Bit odd’
The popular iPlayer service lets users download or stream programmes to a PC.
In its first three months more than 42m programmes have been accessed via the catch-up TV service.
According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.
Mr Gunter is leading the call for the BBC to help pay for the rising costs.
“The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax,” he said.
Bandwidth problems
Mr Highfield told the BBC’s Today programme such “inflammatory” comments were not helpful.
“The success of the iPlayer should be of benefit to the whole UK broadband industry, increasing those who want to take up broadband,” he said.
In his BBC blog last week Mr Highfield laid out a 19-point plan of action for ISPs, and warned they should not try to charge content providers.
“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content works best on (and which to avoid).”
In response Mr Gunter said it was a “bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business”.
“Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears,” he added.
So-called traffic throttling has long been controversial and has been used by ISPs to control those users who eat up bandwidth by downloading huge amounts of material from often illegal file-sharing sites.
But the BBC’s iPlayer service has changed the nature of the problem.
“The iPlayer has come along and made downloading a legal and mass market activity,” said Michael Phillips, from broadband comparison service broadbandchoices.co.uk.
He said he believed ISPs were partly to blame for the bandwidth problems they now face.
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 Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help  Simon Gunter, Tiscali
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“They have priced themselves as cheaply as possible on the assumption that people were just going to use e-mail and do a bit of web surfing,” he said.
ISPs needed to stop using the term ‘unlimited’ to describe their services and make it clear that if people wanted to watch hours of downloaded video content they would have to pay a higher tariff, he added.
He said he believed the BBC needed to compromise.
“There has been talk, for instance, of the BBC bringing their servers into the loop as a way of lowering the backhaul costs,” he said.
But Mr Gunter said he was not convinced this would help.
“I have heard that the BBC is working on building a caching infrastructure so that storage devices can go on an ISP’s network but even if it goes ahead it doesn’t save costs on the backhaul network,” he said.
Gridlock warning
Geoff Bennett, director of product marketing at optical equipment maker Infinera, said he believed the government should broker a deal between the BBC and ISPs.
While allowing BBC content to be ‘cached’ by ISPs might be an instant fix to the problem it may not be the answer as more on-demand, bandwidth heavy applications come online, he said.
“There is a broader issue about the downloading of content and this requires an increase in the pipe where the bottleneck is occurring,” he said.
This would mean upgrades in the so-called backhaul or second mile network, he said.
“The industry has talked a lot about upgrading the last mile network with fibre to the home but the question needs to be asked about whether we should upgrade the second mile. The price of this would be ten times less,” he said.
Some reports, including one from US analyst firm Nemertes Research, have warned of net gridlock as early as 2010 as networks struggle to cope with the amount of data being carried on them.
But the BBC believes that the growth is “manageable”, said Mr Highfield.
“We estimate that currently the iPlayer is having between 3-5% impact on the network,” he said.
- In: Brooke | crash | family | Florida | Hulk Hogan | network | sued | VH1 | victim
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Pro wrestling and reality TV star Hulk Hogan was sued in Florida on Monday by the family of a man who was critically injured in the crash of a car driven by Hogan’s teenage son.
The suit filed in Pinellas County by the parents of John Graziano says Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, was responsible for the August 26 crash in Clearwater, Florida, because he knew his son liked to speed and race other drivers.
Nick Bollea, 17, has been charged with reckless driving. No trial date has been set.
Clearwater police said that Nick Bollea was racing a friend, Daniel Jacobs. Witnesses told investigators they saw the two cars speeding on wet roads before one of them hit a tree. Graziano was a passenger in Bollea’s car.
The suit also names Hogan’s wife, Linda Bollea, Nick Bollea and Jacobs as defendants. Linda Bollea has filed for divorce from her husband.
Edward and Debra Graziano did not ask for a specific amount of damages but said John, 23, may need millions of dollars to pay for medical care for the rest of his life. He remains hospitalized with head injuries.
“He never will be fully the John he was before,” George Tregos, an attorney for the parents, said at a news conference.
Hogan, his wife and son, and their daughter Brooke are in the reality TV show “Hogan Knows Best” on the VH1 network.
(Reporting by Robert Green; Editing by Jim Loney and Xavier Briand)
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