[EAS] Polling interval for CAP station

[Alex Hartman]

If you're polling every 5-10 seconds, you may as well request some
kind of "nailed up" connection if you care that much. Perhaps a full
time VPN tunnel to the aggrigator? A call to my campus IT department
for situations like this is like any government institution. To have
an exception put into the state firewall requires a lot of red tape,
first born, semen sample, etc. It took me about 8 months to bring my
streaming server online because the state IT folk had to audit my
server, monitor it for intrusion, and then request a high-level login
remotely to the machine to, if need be, shut it down. These are the
issues i face being on a campus network.

Now when they see a pretty blue box in the rack, they have no clue
what it is, just that it has a network port on it (same with my
satellite receivers). But as soon as they start monitoring the wire,
they start seeing ARP requests, NTP packets, etc, they start treating
it like a server, but without having the ability of "shutting it down"
they have to investigate further, and in some cases, request design
specs from the manufacturer (and source code) to verify it's
integrity. They justify their jobs this way. They will not take my
word that it's "simply checking in with another site", especially when
it has a mail server running, NTP server, printer spooler services,
etc. And when a server starts making outbound connections, every 3-5
seconds, they "assume" it's been compromised. Again, they won't take
your word that it's a normal thing for it to do.

It's quite a mess to deal with.

--
Alex Hartman

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Lowell Kiesow <lkiesow at kplu.org> wrote:
> That's a problem, but CAP distribution cannot and should not be
> designed to try to solve every odd eventuality at the station
> level.  If the station has a firewall or bandwidth limitation, that
> is for them to solve.  In the case of the University firewall, I
> would think a call to IT department would get it fixed pretty
> quickly.  Besides, if the station does any web streaming, and most
> do, they already know how to solve these kinds of issues.
>
> At 09:36 AM 5/11/2011, you wrote:
>>It looks like what has happened here already with the new State of
>>Indiana IP based EAS receivers....the box has gone dead.
>>
>>Jim Keen
>>WBAA
>>Purdue University
>>West Lafayette, IN
>>(765) 494-3968
>>(765) 426-3123 Cell
>>keenj at purdue.edu
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net]
>>On Behalf Of Alex Hartman
>>
>>This was seriously planned very wrong. Very very wrong, and here's why.
>>
>>My station is at a state university with a very large IT department
>>tied to the state infrastructure. If one mac address is trying to hit
>>the same address every 3 seconds, the state firewall is going to see
>>this box as trying to do something malicious and shut down my port at
>>the switch....
>
>         Lowell Kiesow, Chief Engineer
>         KPLU 88.5, KVIX 89.3, KPLI 90.1
>         www.kplu.org  www.jazz24.org
>
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