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Fork Community Network
Technical Information
Page 1 2 [3] 4 5 ?????????????????????????????????????????? August 20, 2003
The bandwidth upgrade has been completed. We now have over 77 mbps serving our little community network. So far, weve never reached our maximum bandwidth even during our busiest times and weve completed most of our testing and are ready to increase the speed of the cable modems just as soon as we can bring the third router online and clear up the Blaster virus from our network (See below).
A relatively large number of our customers were infected with the new Blaster worm last week. It is important that you understand that the viruses do NOT come from our system, they simply passed through our network into your computers if you hadnt applied the latest patches from Microsoft.
The infected computers began saturating our core switch/router network address translations and the NAT system began to fail. We applied several fixes to help prevent the NAT from being overrun, but we can not fix the infected computers. We need everyone who has Windows 2000 or Windows XP to test their computers for the Blaster virus (or better yet, all viruses) and fix any infected computers. We have been tracking the boxes that we could tell were infected and have called the users, but if your computer was off when we have ran our audits it may still be infected.
We have free CDs available at our office to test and fix the Blaster virus, so if you havent been able to download the test or patch and are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP please contact us.
If you want to help prevent further infections from worm viruses you need to install a firewall at your home and/or make sure you have all the most current patches installed for your version of Windows and NEVER open email attachments unless you know EXACTLY what is contained in them. Email attachment virus infections are by far the most common method of getting a virus.
FYI Because of this virus and warnings of others we have blocked all TCP traffic on ports 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 and 445. As much as we hate to block ports for the entire system, we felt it was necessary in these cases. These are the ONLY ports we currently block and I will list any additional ports we block in these tech pages.