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M V C o m m e n t a t o r
May 1994
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can
be found on mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews.
They're also in the online menu!
New Phones
More talk about the telephones: On June 1, MV will be
adding some more phone lines for all purposes. This isn't
all that noteworthy except for the other things that will be
happening at the same time.
Hunt groups splitting.
Up until now, we've maintained a single hunt group for online and
interactive use, and some time ago added the SLIP/PPP lines into
this group. We've arranged the hunt group in order of increasing
modem capabil ity: 2400 baud only, followed by V.32/V.32bis,
followed by Telebit Worldblazers. You could dial the lead number
of the appropriate group, and if your call hunted beyond this, you
would get a modem of higher capacity but your needs would still be
met. The drawback here was that as we added modems, we added them
to the end of the V.32bis group but before the Worldblazer group,
and this greatly complicated things for the telephone company,
resulting in downtime lasting 6 hours or more.
We will be splitting the hunt groups, moving the World-
blazers to their own group - still starting at the same
number, 429-1735. Worldblazers are mainly used by UUCP call-
ers. When we add modems now, they will be V.fc (later V.34)
capable, and will be added to the end of the main hunt group.
2400 baud access gone. In concert with this change, we
will upgrade all of the 2400 baud lines to higher speed
modems, and do away with the notion of a 2400 baud access
subsection. After this, there will be two groups of modem
classes in the main hunt group: V.32/V.32bis, and V.fc
(later, V.34), plus a separate Worldblazer hunt group.
Your password
For an online account, your password is a thing that
should be known only by yourself, and it should be changed
periodically. You can change your password by giving the
command passwd at the UNIX prompt, or by selecting the change
password entry from the menu. For good reason, the password
changing utility requires you to use a mixture of letters and
digits, but you should not use easily guessable passwords
such as your birthday, commonly known ID numbers (e.g. phone
number), or common patterns such as, for example, as your
first name followed by "123." While attempts to break into
accounts are rare, relying on rarity is foolish. Common
attack methods are through owners relying on weak passwords
(names or words easily associated with the owner) or on weak
protection of the password (for instance writing the password
down, telling it to somebody, allowing somebody to see you
type it, entering it on a computer that may be monitoring
your keystrokes, or giving it to somebody who seems to have
an official need for it). Note that this applies to other
things in daily life, such as the PIN number on your ATM
card, or your Social Security number.
If you forget your password, we can not find out what it
was; our only recourse is to set a new one for you. To do
this, we need to call you at the number we have on file for
you so that someone pretending to be you can not have your
password changed. If all this sounds overly paranoid, just
remember that your Internet account is an important part of
your identity, and one that should be safeguarded.
Your Internet Identity
Speaking about your identity on the Internet, there are
some pieces of identifying information associated with your
online account that are visible to the Internet public at
large. By default, this only includes your real name or the
name of the organization associated with your account, but it
also can include your home and work phone numbers, a loca-
tion, and even some text describing you or your interests.
This information can be retrieved by using the finger util-
ity. For instance, try (at the UNIX prompt):
finger -l mem@mv.mv.com
This will show you the information about Mark Mallett. There
are three parts of this information that you can set: per-
sonal data, a plan, and a project.
Personal data includes your real name, phone numbers,
and location. You can change this information by issuing the
command chfn at the UNIX command prompt. This will put you
into the text editor, with a number of lines of information.
Each line begins with a label ending with a colon, and fol-
lowed by the information associated with that label. Change
only the information after the label. When you are done,
save the changes and exit the editor, and your information
will be updated.
The plan and the project are two places to put extended
information about you, and about what you are doing, respec-
tively. The project is an archaic piece of data used by com-
puter programmers and researchers to show what they were
working on, and is not used extensively these days. However,
the plan is often used to tell information about you or your
company, or most anything that you wish to supply. To create
a plan, edit a file named ".plan" (that's period and "plan")
in your home directory. (Files beginning with period are
hidden files, and are not normally shown when you get a
directory listing. To see them in the directory listing,
give the -a option to the ls command, e.g.
ls -a). Insert whatever text you wish to supply. You must
also grant access to this file for anyone who wants to read
it: by default this access is restricted, and only you can
read your own files. Do this by typing:
chmod a+r .plan
at the UNIX prompt (this means change the access mode of the
file to add read permissions for all users). To create a
project file, use the same procedure, but with a file named
".project" instead.