Re: Researcher Activities

["HALL, NATHANIEL D." <halln () OTC EDU>]

"Research, after all, is one of the reasons we're here. I figure my job 
is to help them get that done without compromising something else."

Ah, the benefit of working at a community college that is known for
their programs. :)

--
Nathaniel Hall, GSEC GCFW GCIA GCIH GCFA
Network Security System Administrator
OTC Computer Networking
(417) 447-7535


-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Cal Frye
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 11:27 PM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Researcher Activities

Willis Marti wrote:
> How do y'all deal with faculty that want to do things like ICMP-scan
the 
> IPv4 address space? Or try out the next web crawler? Or enumerate http

> servers?

For some of these, we would try to educate them on the impact of their 
project, and try to help them find alternatives or at least kinder 
approaches to achieve their goals.

We got a complaint a little while back about one of our systems banging 
on a national candidate's campaign web site. Turns out we have a 
research project in Political Science that's collecting an archive of 
all the candidates' web sites as the season progresses.

We worked with them to throttle back their crawler to a less aggressive 
mode while still capturing the data they were interested in.

We also worked with our Dorm Energy Consumption research team to provide

a means to correlate a student's IP address with the Residence Hall and 
floor of the student for their research and feedback (see this week's 
Chronicle). Tricky, as we had to pull together three databases to get 
the join they needed and then export just the relevant bits so they 
never had personally identifiable information in their (less secure) 
database. It would have been easier if we were way more heavily routed, 
but what can one do?

Research, after all, is one of the reasons we're here. I figure my job 
is to help them get that done without compromising something else.

-- 
Regards,
-- Cal Frye, Network Administrator, Oberlin College

    www.calfrye.com,  www.pitalabs.com


"Universalism struck hell from the theological menu; Unitarianism 
removed original sin. --Forrest Church.