[LON-CAPA-admin] Not finding hosts

[Todd Ruskell]

Hi,

About a week ago, our IT folks started blocking all outgoing ping
packets due to nasty worms.  When this happened, my daily email alert
started reporting that it couldn't find any of the rpm repositories,
from which I deduced that lon-capa uses ping to determine whether or not
those hosts are up.

I requested that IT open up ping from our lon-capa server, and they
apparently did so.  The script now finds distro.ibiblio.org, but cannot
seem to find the install.lon-capa.org, or mirror.pa.msu.edu.

Several questions:  (1) do other people see problems with
install.lon-capa.org and mirror.pa.msu.edu?

(2) If not, what other services does lon-capa use that might cause
failure at the msu sites, but success in connecting to
distro.ibiblio.org?

(3) Somewhat related: Our IT staff will soon be introducing a
campus-wide firewall that is supposed to allow all outgoing connections
initiated from inside campus, but block all incoming connections unless
we explicitly request holes.
According to the lon-capa FAQ, the following ports and services are
required to be open:
Port 5663, for the TCP/IP course management traffic layer
Port 80, for HTTP
Port 8080, for login

This may be a naive question, but what *services* are used on port 8080
for login?  Just http? ssl?  Are there other services than the TCP/IP
layer on port 5663, or are all those services nicely wrapped?  I am
pretty sure we need to provide not only port information, but a complete
list of services offered on each port.


Thanks for you help.

Todd

Here is my ALERT email from this morning:
---------------------------
THIS SCRIPT IS NOW PROBING SEVERAL FTP SERVERS....
PLEASE BE PATIENT, THIS MAY TAKE A FEW MINUTES.
Trying install.lon-capa.org...
...cannot find ftpmirror:loncapa at install.lon-capa.org on the network
Trying mirror.pa.msu.edu...
...cannot find mirror.pa.msu.edu on the network
Trying distro.ibiblio.org...
distro.ibiblio.org found...
perl /usr/local/loncapa/bin/check-rpms -nk  --rpmuser www -ftp
distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/redhat/updates/7.3/en/os
**** WARNING **** You need to update at least 3 RPMS shown in
the list below.  THIS IS IMPORTANT FOR SECURITY.

gdm-2.2.3.1-23.i386.rpm
kernel-source-2.4.20-20.7.i386.rpm
mozilla-nss-devel-1.0.2-2.7.3.i386.rpm

Please visit
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/redhat/updates/7.3/en/os
and download the RPMS you need.
For instructions on working with (and upgrading) RPMS, please
visit http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/.
To automatically download these RPMs to /tmp/loncapa_rpm_updates/,
run the CHECKRPMS command as "./CHECKRPMS --download"
CHECKRPMS should be located in /usr/local/loncapa/bin/.