Packetizer News

Pug is automated backup software designed for use on Linux that allows one to copy files on a server to cloud storage, compressing and encrypting each file individually before uploading.

Unlike other backup solutions that require use of external physical storage and backing up the same data over and over again, Pug works incrementally. As new files are created or as files change, Pug pushes them into the cloud. Only new or changed files are backed up and every version (or as many versions as you specify) is maintained in the cloud, any one of which may be immediately accessed. Further, Pug is smart enough to recognize that two files are identical and only archives a single copy of a file in cloud storage, thus reducing storage costs.

Pug uses Amazon S3 for cloud storage, through the software is designed so that changes can easily be made to support other cloud storage services.

To learn more about Pug, visit the Pug home page!

People are well aware of the fact that there are many security vulnerabilities on the Internet. Perhaps one of the biggest that has largely gone unaddressed is security for the Domain Name System (DNS) that is used on the Internet to, among other things, map names to IP addresses and to identify mail servers. Virtually every domain on the Internet today is insecure in this respect. An attacker in a position to respond to DNS queries and provide bogus replies can intercept confidential corporate email messages, direct people to phishing sites, etc.

The DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) were defined to address this serious vulnerability on the Internet. The extensions are documented in RFC 4033, RFC 4034, and RFC 4035. They have been around for years now, but only recently has the Internet community taken forward steps to enable DNSSEC.

A number of registrars now support DNSSEC, including Packetizer’s registrar. So, we decided to enable DNSSEC. At the moment, there are really very few domains that are protected with DNSSEC, but the number of sites is expected to increase significantly in the next year or two.

Interested in setting up DNSSEC on your own site? Here’s a brief “how to”.

Packetizer is pleased to announce the creation of a set of specifications referred to as the Packetizer Open Community Specifications (POCS). These specifications are intended to document new protocols or extensions to existing protocols that are created by the public at large.

The first specification published (POCS-1) is titled “Using OPTIONS to Query for Operational Status in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)” and is a document the authors tried to publish through the IETF. It failed to gain traction, not because equipment manufacturers are not implementing the procedures (they are, actually), but because trying to get consensus in the IETF is sometimes like herding a bunch of cats. Rather than expending significant effort trying to jump through hurdles, the authors decided to publish the specification so there is a permanent record, but outside the IETF.

The second document published (POCS-2) is titled “Transmission of a Session Capacity Estimate (SCE) to Prevent Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Server Overload” and represents a valid and proven approach to preventing overload of SIP entities, particularly devices like Session Border Controllers. In this case, the IETF opted to limit the scope of their work such that SBCs and similar devices could not benefit from the defined overload mechanism. Specifically, the scope of the work in the IETF was on stateless entities like stateless SIP proxies. In the real world, there are many SBCs and a better approach is needed.

Packetizer would like to extend an invitation to the Packetizer community to publish new and different specifications as POCS documents. The type of documents that would be accepted include anything that might be of interest to the Packetizer community, including extensions to existing communication protocols, new web protocols, protocols for cloud computing support, etc.

Earlier this year, work on AMS, the ITU-T’s next-generation multimedia communication system, was conducted through electronic meetings held twice each month. As the SG16 meeting at the end of July 2010 approached, the meetings were suspended. It is now time to resume those meetings and a meeting schedule has been posted to the Packetizer Calendar page.

The electronic meetings are open to all who are interested in helping to progress the work on the revolutionary new multimedia system. Part of the time during the first meeting, to be held October 5, 2010, will be spent bringing participants up to speed on the work done so far, what work is currently being actively studied, and what needs to be done. Subsequent meetings will consider contributions submitted by participants as they are submitted.

If you have any questions or wish to engage, visit the H.325 Information Site for more information, including subscription information to the mailing list.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will offer its very popular course Understanding and Troubleshooting Videoconferencing Networks on November 2-3, 2010. The course will be held on the University campus in Madison, WI and will also be available via live videoconferencing.

By attending this course, you will master the H.323 standard and embedded protocols and then extend this understanding to SIP based and proprietary systems. Topics include:

• H.323 standard: components and functions • Call signal processing and audio/video data flow • QOS: options, implementation issues • How ITU H.323 relates to IETF SIP and MGCP/Megaco • Options for handling firewalls in the network • Addressing and directory services • Performance characteristics of various audio and video codecs • Network security and other advanced features • High definition videoconferencing options and content display • Troubleshooting and analysis tools and techniques • Understanding audio and video compression technology

Your course instructor, Gary Thom, is President of Delta Information Systems, a recognized expert in the field of videoconferencing, and the author of versions 1 & 2 of the H.323 standard.

Reserve your space today! Call toll-free 1-800-462-0876 Or online at http://epdweb.engr.wisc.edu/courseL800

We have reported several times about our email server being blocked by spam-fighting organizations. While most organizations are quick to respond, some refuse to address the issue and others refuse to even talk to us about the issue. What's most frustrating is that our mail server does not send spam.

We are still blocked by SORBS, who told us without hesitation that, until Amazon pays them money, they're not going to unblock our address. The way they phrased their demands, it sounded like extortion to us. Apparently, they block all Amazon IP addresses and, since our mail server operates in the Amazon EC2 cloud, customers of SORBS are unable to participate on mailing lists we operate on Packetizer, specifically lists.packetizer.com.

More recently, Symantec has become a problem. Sadly, this is an organization that we could generally consider more reputable than others. Unfortunately, the company decided to block our mail server by assigning it a 'bad' reputation. This has affected Ericsson and perhaps other companies that would normally participate in ITU-T SG16 activities.

We tried contacting Symantec and they told us that they will not correct the problem, since we are not their customer. We've tried to explain that their customers are entirely unaware of the fact that they are being blocked, but they did not care. We alerted Ericsson once we became aware of this issue, but we do not have any way of knowing if other companies are blocked due to use of Symantec's Brightmail or other spam blocking services or products offered by Symantec.

If you attempt to join a mailing list on Packetizer and never get a response indicating that you successfully joined and your company uses Symantec products or services, then Symantec may be to blame.

OpenID is a web technology that allows a user have a single user identity and password that may be used to access any number of web sites, thus removing the age-old problem of having to maintain separate login and passwords for all of the various accounts on has on the Internet.

It is now supported by many web sites, including Google, Slashdot, Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Orange, MySpace, WordPress, AOL, and Facebook. Some of those organizations are 'identity providers', while some are end-user sites that rely on the identity providers to allow users to gain access to site content.

We produced an OpenID identity server software package for anybody who might be interested in running their own identity server. Perhaps equally important, though, is that we also added support to Packetizer Forums so that one may use OpenID to login, post questions, or reply to questions.

We hope OpenID support proves to be a popular and valuable service to the Packetizer Community.

At the most recent meeting of ITU-T SG16, the H.325 experts decided to initiate a series of electronic meetings in order to help progress the work. For those interested in participating in the creation of this exciting new multimedia system, see the meeting notice posted on the h325-design mailing list.

As we reported earlier, a number of spam-fighting organizations decided to block part or all of Amazon's EC2 service. This caused significant disruption to the mailing lists that we operate on Packetizer's mailing list server, including which provides list services for those working on ITU-T related work.

This past month, Spamhaus decided to block all of Amazon, in spite of the fact that we had previously submitted our IP address for removal at Spamhaus. That resulted in about 30 people getting kicked off of various mailing lists. So, if anybody reading this is wondering why you have not received email in a while related to H.323, H.325 or other protocols, Spamhaus might be the reason.

Fortunately, Spamhaus and Amazon quickly reached an agreement on how better coordinate in order to ensure that all of Amazon's EC2 IP addresses are not blocked again. To that end, Amazon now requests all mail servers to be registered with Amazon, which of course we did immediately. Amazon reviewed our request and granted authorization to use the server in order to transmit email.

On or about the same time, unfortunately, Amazon was also listed in MAPS and SORBS, two other spam-fighting organizations. We visited the MAPS web site, provided our IP address, and were almost immediately removed from their list.

SORBS, on the other hand, has been a real problem. The organization absolutely refuses to unblock Amazon EC2 or our individual address. We contacted SORBS and, while they were responsive, their reply was less than satisfactory. One of the more polite statements was:

You are not required to make a donation for delisting as the entry was not generated because of your actions, however the listing will not be removed until your service provider terminates the spammers or makes the required donation.

That is perhaps the closest thing we have ever seen to extortion. Sadly, while we continued to have a friendly dialog, after 20 days our mail server is still blocked by SORBS. It would appear they have absolutely no intention of removing Amazon EC2 and we do not believe that Amazon has any intent to work with them either. We can only suggest that if your company is using SORBS, you consider using an alternative blacklisting service.

Spam has been a problem for years and it seems almost impossible to address. Two years ago, Packetizer was receiving thousands of spam messages per day and we were forced to implement various spam blocking technologies, including blacklisting IP addresses. As much as we hated to do that, it became necessary, as it was otherwise impossible to find and read the legitimate email. We also began employing technologies like SPF and are also now using DKIM, digitally signing every message transmitted by our mail server.

It was never our intention to block legitimate mail servers and as issues were brought to our attention, we took immediate steps to resolve the problems. Our servers would provide a response back to senders when they are blocked and we also provided a tool where anyone can query to see if their server is blocked.

In the spring of 2009, our mail server was re-located and is now running inside Amazon's EC2 cloud service. We were assigned a static IP address and have been using that same IP address for all outbound mail since. Initially, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that our server was actually blacklisted on a few Internet blacklists. However, we were quickly able to resolve those issues with the more legitimate blacklisting organizations, such as Spamhaus and Spamcop. Unfortunately, UCE PROTECT was not very willing to cooperate. After a month of negotiating, they finally agreed to remove us from their list.

The reason our server was on their list is because we run mailing lists and some bots subscribe (or attempt to subscribe) to mailing lists using bogus addresses, to which our server politely responds with a welcome message, assuming the message passes the SPF test. (We are presently not enforcing DKIM, but will once this is generally practiced.) Unfortunately, UCE PROTECT treats those messages as spam messages and then places our server on the blacklist.

Packetizer was not listed on UCE PROTECT's blacklist for several months, but it appears we are now listed again. We attempted to contact UCE PROTECT via email and were blocked. So, there appears to be little or nothing we can do: we cannot even discuss the issue.

Unfortunately, many people on the H.323 Announce list and other mailing lists are not receiving messages and, in some cases, are being removed from mailing lists due to message rejections. Please note that this is not our fault and if you find yourself unsubscribed, definitely feel welcome to subscribe again. If your service provider or employer is using UCE PROTECT, you may wish to ask them to stop using the service.