TELECOM Digest     Mon, 27 Jun 94 17:23:00 CDT    Volume 14 : Issue 300

Inside This Issue:                           Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Book Review: "Understanding Local Area Networks" by Schatt (Rob Slade)
    Canadian Internet Handbook Now Available in U.S. (Rick Broadhead)
    Wireless Comms Summer Course (Richard Tsina)
    Need Help Setting up Service (Dialins ,etc) (C. Mohr)
    MCI Solicitations Cause Havoc at Our Company (Bill Garfield)
    Book Review: "The Internet Book" by Comer (Rob Slade)
    Canadian Chat Line Case (Dave Leibold)
    Re: O.J. Simpson Case (Robert L. McMillin)

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Rob Slade <roberts@decus.ca>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 06:49:27 MDT
Subject: Book Review: "Understanding Local Area Networks" by Schatt


BKUNDLAN.RVW  940415
 
SAMS Understanding Series
Prentice Hall Computer Publishing
113 Sylvan Avenue
Englewood Cliffs, NJ   07632
(515) 284-6751  FAX (515) 284-2607
or
11711 N. College Ave.
Carmel, IN   46032-9903
or
201 W. 103rd Street
Indianapolis, IN   46290
or
15 Columbus Circle
New York, NY   10023
800-428-5331
or
Market Cross House
Cooper Street
Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1EB  England
phyllis@prenhall.com - Phyllis Eve Bregman is postmaster
70621.2737@CompuServe.COM Alan Apt
Beth Mullen-Hespe beth_hespe@prenhall.com
"Understanding Local Area Networks", Schatt, 1992, 0-672-30115-6,
U$26.95/C$34.95
 
This is a readable and fairly comprehensive guide to the concepts and
terminology behind Local Area Networks.  While it gives a thorough
background to a wide range of LAN features, technical details are
scant.  This may be good news to the executive trying to get an
initial grasp of networking; it may present problems to the manager
charged with coming up with a plan for implementation.
 
Three initial chapters provide basic concepts and jargon for LANs,
basic parts and pieces, and connections to wide area networks.  Four
major network operating systems are described in further chapters, and
it is nice to see some mention of OS/2 and Macintosh systems included.
Chapter eight is a bit odd: of the four "other" LANs listed, two are
hardware interfaces rather than network operating systems.  A further
three chapters look at electronic mail options, management and
networkable software.  The book closes with a chapter on LAN selection
and appendices with vendor addresses, a glossary and a bibliography.
 
The material is very basic and almost completely non-technical.  The
content will certainly help a neophyte to get started, or someone who
has to "start from zero" on a major networking project.  However, the
lack of technical details could allow for major disasters in the
choice of systems.  For example, the topologies are described
correctly, but the load implications of the different access methods
are never discussed.  An ethernet, with repeaters, could conceivably
service an entire ten-storied building.  With heavy loads, however,
you would probably want to break that down into a series of smaller
networks with routing.  If response time is critical, you probably
need token-ring access in order to guarantee an upper bound to
delays.  (The lack of detail extends to the review questions at the
end of each chapter.  These are extremely simple queries from the
lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy, and only serve to check whether
you've read every sentence.)
 
A possibly useful start, but far from being complete.
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994   BKUNDLAN.RVW  940415. Distribution
permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated newsgroups/mailing lists.

DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters
Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733
DECUS Symposium '95, Toronto, ON, February 13-17, 1995, contact:
rulag@decus.ca

------------------------------

From: Rick Broadhead <HANDBOOK@VM1.YorkU.CA>
Subject: Canadian Internet Handbook Now Available in U.S.
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 12:33:00 GMT


June 24, 1994              Contact:  Beth Hespe
                           PTR Prentice Hall
                           (201) 592-2348 (Tel)
                           (201) 592-2785 (Fax)

      T H E   C A N A D I A N   I N T E R N E T   H A N D B O O K
                  Now Available in the United States
   Foreword by Jean Monty, President and CEO of Northern Telecom Limited

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, June 24, 1994 -- Prentice Hall/PTR and
Prentice Hall Canada proudly announce that, due to popular demand, the
Canadian Internet Handbook by Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead is now
available in the United States.

In the last three months, the Canadian Internet Handbook has established
itself as a genuine Canadian publishing phenomenon.  It has been on the
Toronto Star's National Bestseller List for the last two months, and
for six consecutive weeks, the book was the #1 selling non-fiction
paperback in Canada.  The authors believe it to be the first
Internet book ever published to reach the #1 position on a general
bestseller list.  The Canadian Internet Handbook has also achieved
bestseller status in several other prominent Canadian newspapers,
including the Financial Post, Ottawa Citizen, and the Globe and Mail.

This is a significant accomplishment for a country the size of Canada.
With over 35,000 copies printed and distributed in Canada alone,
the Canadian Internet Handbook has far exceeded the normal
Canadian bestseller status of 5,000 copies.

Due to great demand for the book in the U.S. market, the Canadian
Internet Handbook is now being distributed in the U.S.  by Prentice
Hall.

The Canadian Internet Handbook provides Internet users with
comprehensive directories of Canadian Internet resources, including
Canadian Gopher servers, WWW servers, and Internet-accessible library
catalogues.  The book also includes a detailed listing of Canadian
Usenet groups, and a list of over 700 organizations that are using the
Internet in Canada.  Other chapters discuss such topics as "What's
Wrong With the Internet?", and "Where is the Internet Going in
Canada?"  The book covers all the popular Internet tools - Mail,
Telnet, FTP, Gopher, WAIS, WWW - and provides many examples of how
Canadian businesses and individuals are using the Internet.  Shell
Canada, Midland Walwyn, the Regina Public Library, and the Canadian
Space Agency are some of the organizations profiled in the book.  Jean
Monty, President and CEO of Northern Telecom Limited, introduces the
book with a foreword.

For further pricing and ordering information, point your Gopher client at:

gopher.prenhall.com

WWW users can point their browser at the following URL:

http://www.csi.nb.ca/handbook/handbook.html

For more information, please contact the authors of the book:

Rick Broadhead           Jim Carroll
handbook@uunet.ca        handbook@uunet.ca

------------------------------

From: course@garnet.berkeley.edu
Subject: Wireless Comms Summer Course
Date: 27 Jun 1994 18:03:09 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley


U.C. BERKELEY
Continuing Education in Engineering
Announces a short course on Wireless Technology:

WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
(July 26-27, 1994)
     
     There are technical bottlenecks to developing a ubiquitous
wireless multimedia environment: the capacity of the radio link, its
unreliability due to the adverse multipath propagation channel, and
severe interference from other channels.

     This course covers the principles and fundamental concepts
engineers need to tackle these limitations (e.g., a thorough treatment
of channel impairments such as fading and multipath dispersion and
their effect on link and network performance).  Topics include:
Introduction to Wireless Channels, Cellular Telephone Networks, Analog
and Digital Transmission and Wireless Data Networks.  Comprehensive
course notes will be provided.

Lecturer: JEAN-PAUL M.G. LINNARTZ, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of
California, Berkeley.  His work on traffic analysis in mobile radio
networks received the Veder Prize, an innovative research in
telecommunications award in the Netherlands.  At Berkeley he works on
communications for intelligent vehicle highway systems and multimedia
communications.  Professor Linnartz is the author of numerous
publications and the book "Narrow Land-Mobile Radio Networks" (Artech
House, 1993), the text for the course.

For more information (brochure with complete course descriptions,
outlines, instructor bios, etc.,) send your postal address to:

Richard Tsina
U.C. Berkeley Extension
Continuing Education in Engineering
2223 Fulton St.  Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel: (510) 642-4151  Fax: (510) 643-8683
email:  course@garnet.berkeley.edu

------------------------------

From: mohrc@storm.cs.orst.edu (C Mohr)
Subject: Need Help Setting up Service (Dialins, etc)
Date: 27 Jun 1994 04:43:58 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Oregon State University


Hi,

I'm hoping someone(s) out there can help me with a few questions.
First what I am trying to do. A few of us here with some money to burn
(but not to much) and some Unix experience want to set up a internet
access service in a fairly large town here. There is no access except
the local college, which only lets students on their machines due to
lack of dialins. There are also no services that are a "local
sprintnet" call away (unless you count Delphi or Prodigy; I'm refering
to services such as Netcom.) We want to start fairly small and wait
until we start getting more users to upgrade to bigger machines. What
we are thinking of doing is getting a Pentium 99 with 64 or 32 megs of
memory, two or three gigs of SCSI harddrive and putting the latest
version of linux on it (uh oh I hear groans ;]). We are currently
running linux 1.1.18 on a Pentium 60 and it seems to be running fairly
well (although it only has four or five users and a mud running on it)
which is why we choose that OS (plus its free.)  We want to put in a
minimum of 10 dialin lines to start, maybe 16 (this is where I start
having problems ;]) Since there are two local colleges both with T1 or
better lines we plan to (try) to get a T1 line as our connection to
the net.

Now the questions:

Is it a really bad idea to use Linux for this task? If so why? What's a
better suggestion? We dont want to sink 100 grand into this right
away, over time maybe.

Do you think a Pentium 99 will be able to handle 25 users at a time?
50? 100?

Is there a maximum number of connections at a time under Linux? Maximum
memory or HD?

Does Linux support tape backups besides the "qic format" something in
the one to two gig format? Does it support multiple serial port cards
(meaning the 8-16 or higher port cards)? If so what kind (for both
questions)

If (and even if it does) Linux doesn't support multiple serial port
cards what is the best way to get 8-32+ dialins to the Linux box? I'm
guessing some type of modem server, can someone tell me how these work
(the more specific the better) and who some good companies are to
contact about these?

How is a T1 line connected to Unix machines? Directly, a router, what?
Is it different for each case? If this is the sole machine would it be
a direct connection (and later when we add more machines add the
router/gateway/whatever it is ...?) Is a seperate "gateway" machine
required or can the same machine act as both?

Can someone point me at the NW USA internet providers that offer
connections to companies that plan to offer pay for accounts? I am
only aware of one provider (NWnet) and i'm not certain they allow
this. Is there a list of providers such as this? email/voice contact
numbers needed as well if possible.

Are there any suggestions (besides give up ;]) you have? Any technical
knowhow or whatever is also GREATLY appreciated! Sorry if I am asking
some very basic questions or things I "should" know but this will be
my first time setting up a Unix network from ground zero (IE no T1 no
dialins etc). I have set up two new Sequent machines for a university
here but they did all the network connections and the modems were easy
since they wanted them connected to the backplane (64 rs232 connecters
weee fun!) Also any FAQ's would be great if you can point me at them
(books are ok also but prefer free pubs or help for now ;])

Thanks ALOT for all help provided and we hope to see you on the net
soon!

PLEASE E-Mail all replies if someone else is interested I'll be glad
to forward them to you.


mohrc@storm.cs.orst.edu

------------------------------

Subject: MCI Solicitations Cause Havoc at Our Company
From: bill.garfield@yob.com (Bill Garfield)
Date: Sun, 26 Jun 94 10:21:00 -0600
Organization: Ye Olde Bailey BBS - Houston, TX - 713-520-1569
Reply-To: bill.garfield@yob.com (Bill Garfield)


At my company my whole DID number block has been literally under seige
for the past six months by the MCI autodialers.  At first we had no
idea where it was coming from; hundreds of single-jingles a day, at
16-minute intervals, across large blocks of our DID number span.
These appeared as one-ringers, apparently because MCI's *DYSFUNCTIONAL* 
autodialers interpreted our PBX's double ring cadence as a "busy" and so 
immediately dropped the call ... BUT KEPT TRYING AND RETRYING AND...
AND...!!!!

After suffering under this continuing barrage of five-second duration
calls for nearly a month I handed the problem to SWBT's Annoyance Call
Bureau.  Ten of the extensions then under assualt were put up on call
trace and the data collection process began.  SWBT's Major Account
Center in Houston contacted me to advise that without exception, *ALL*
the nuisance/harrassing calls were coming from the same trunk group,
MCI.

I was given a local number to use in contacting someone at MCI's
Houston POP -- which coincidentally is right across the street from my
office.  Then for two more weeks I called the MCI POP at least twice
daily and faxed thousands of call records to them to use in continuing
the trace.  "Shirley", one of the switchpersons, finally let it slip
that these calls were coming from MCI Telemarketing Centers at Denver
and Phoenix!

Having positively identified the source, it still took TWO MORE WEEKS
of nuisance calls to get relief.  But it was over, or at least I thought 
it was.

Early in May of this year, the by now very recognizeable single-jingle, 
16-minute interval calls were back. However, this time attacking only
one extension, 4796.  According to SMDR records my subscriber tolerated 
the single-jingle attack an average of twelve times a day for three whole
weeks before contacting anyone. (Patient fellow, huh?)  As soon as I
saw the calling pattern I had strong suspicions of -who- the culprit
was, but I called SWBT's Call Annoyance Bureau again anyway.  The CAB
put the number on call trace and another week passed while we collected 
SMDR evidence. Suspicions confirmed! The MCI trunk group was again
identified as the source.  MCI's Houston POP again confirmed that the
calls were originating from their Denver telemarketing center.

Again I demanded, much less politely than before, that this activity
immediately cease and desist.  Again it took an entire week for MCI to
get it under control.

