[tech] University Computer Club — Network Connection follow up

[Nick Bannon]

Hey all! I think it's time to get a bit more of a summary out there
in referrable mail rather than ephemeral chat. I did think that there
was a followup meeting regarding the general topic tomorrow (Thursday)
but we haven't seen a specific confirmatory MS Teams meeting link.

Nick.

On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 02:00:31AM +0800, Timothy wrote:
> Thank you for meeting with us to discuss UCC’s networking situation a fortnight
> ago. [...]

The Australian university community has built a series of world-class
Internet research networks; and the UCC of UWA has been actively
contributing from its small corner of that, all the way through. This
has been to the benefit of its members and the UWA institution, through
cycles of centralisation and devolution.

We're proud of and have demonstrated responsibility for our small part of
the (((UCC) of the Student Guild) of The University of Western Australia)
name and reputation.

However, now and then we drop out of touch with our upstream for a while,
until something changes. Some of that is captured in ServiceNow logs
lately, but we've gotten back in contact for a bit more of a pro-active
talk with University IT this past year, including a MS Teams meeting on
2021-09-02T14:30, due for a followup tomorrow.

UCC, and the Guild, are not your average University department. We're
collecting some of our specific use cases in places like:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/universitycomputerclub/posts/6234597223248807
- hosting bespoke webapps and providing computing and internetworking
  resources for our member's undergraduate; honours; and through to PhD studies
  and research, e.g. [OX*] , [CMD] , ...?
- developing and hosting free-and-open-source SSH and DNS servers and
  numerous other network protocols
  - some requiring direct end-to-end authentication
- hosting bridge-bots and build-bots to support computer language
  development and free-and-open-source software projects
- domain and service hosting for ourselves, members, other Guild clubs
- more names, references and details keenly sought, remind us!

Sometimes we're the canary-in-the-coal-mine that can notice changes that
affect the University as a whole, where other users may not be able to
diagnose or produce a high quality issue report. e.g.
- INC0251606 IPv6 outage
- INC0251638 ICMP blocking and testing (leading to TCP breakage)
- INC0425380 Legacy routing preventing access to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service
- INC0425380 TCP resets and stateful routers?
- stateful router overload in 2016-12?

Other times our normal operations have hiccups; or get noticed by routine
network scans - which is no bad thing when it reminds people of the lines
of communication:
- INC0468212/INC0467345 DNS mooneye/Cloudflare
- INC0644290 SSH
- INC0629296 routine network scan, NTP

Nick.
University Computer Club, Sysadmin/tech-contact group
wheel at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal