With the rapid increase in activity on the Internet during the last year, there has also been an increase in break-in attempts from off-campus sites.
To reduce our risks, on June 20, 1994, we began filtering off-campus TCP/IP traffic to the ACS cluster. Many of the protocols which are filtered out are not commonly used. Two notable exceptions are 'rsh' and 'rlogin.'
We no longer allow rsh or rlogin traffic from or to off-campus sites. Both present a special security concern as they require us to trust authentication information from the remote site. We had hoped to allow rlogin and rsh traffic TO off-campus sites, but even this proved to be impossible without opening a security hole.
Only sites outside the Campus Network will be affected; oncampus traffic (with the Charles River and Medical campuses treated as one) will continue as is.
If you have been using rlogin to reach the Campus Network from a remote site, use 'telnet' instead. The telnet protocol, along with other network services such as ftp, WWW, gopher, mail (smtp), and X should not be affected.
If you have questions or are experiencing problems, send mail to 'help' and we will try to answer your questions.