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	ETAC Committee
	February 18, 2004 Minutes
	EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY COMMITTEE 02/18/2004, 12:30-2:00 pm ATTENDEES: Carole Chapman, Kim Chief Elk, Tom Dolen, Dave Gillett, Scott Heffner, William Le, Chuck Lindauer, Penny Patz, Willie Pritchard, Eric Rosenthal, Jaci Ward GUESTS: Gerry Gyuire, Sharon Luciw, Mike Murphy, Tom Roza, Linda Elvin Convened: 12:34 pm 1. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING · Carole Chapman requested that the minutes reflect the information about e-mails that have been bounced back to the sender without any notification to the recipient 2. GENERAL NEWS- ETS TECH USE SURVEY RESULTS; NEWSBYTES NEXT ISSUE COMING SOON, FHDA PUBLIC DOMAIN POLICY · The next NewsBytes will be out this Friday, or by early next week Will try to have one issue per quarter · Draft copies of the Tech Use Survey results were handed out for review Willie gave a brief overview of the surveys results There will be a complete copy of the survey, along with the six open-ended questions and their unedited responses, posted on the ETS website by the end of this week New on-line survey software was used this year, which allowed for greater flexibility in routing people, depending upon their responses There was a request to add a "neutral" response to the questions that had "strongly agree", "agree", "disagree", etc to the customer satisfaction questions The IR staff went over the survey questions and didn't recommend that response Can discuss it with IR about modifying next year's responses to include a neutral response There was an inquiry into whether or not a similar survey has been ask of students Not yet, but maybe something could be done in the open labs Could possibly be done through the new portal software that we are going to be installing - it has a built in polling capability We may roll out next years Tech Survey through the portal The polling feature could be generalized to all or tailored to individuals Faculty cannot use the feature for their own individual polling Willie urged members to share the survey results with their constituency groups · FHDA Public domain policy At last nights Board meeting, Hal Plotkin, purposed that the board institute a board policy about public domain software, which would encourage the use of public domain courseware in the district ETAC may be responsible for moving this public domain policy through the governance process There was a presentation from a representative from Creative Commons (a non profit group in the valley) about the licensing agreements they have created for those who want to put their materials into the public domain This comes at a time when we are moving forward in a couple of different areas with using public domain/open source software products within our district: 1) We have used Linux for quite a while as an operating system - and have a number of servers that run under this operating system 2) The portal software, that we got a grant for last summer, is an open source product We will be able to use public domain open source portlets that work with the portal, ones that are appropriate for us, and when we develop portlets, we can put them into the open domain 3) The grant we received from Hewlett is to develop and produce 20 open source courseware modules by the end of this year Vivian Sinou, at Foothill, is heading up this effort Hewlett has asked us to supply them with a much larger grant, to become a national center for open source courseware in Community Colleges We are also working with a group of research universities, on the Sakai Project, which developed an open course management system. We are working with them to take their open source course management system and tweak it for use by Community Colleges This policy could be affected by Section 508 compliance Will discuss this potential policy in more detail at the next meeting Will talk about a procedure for how we might work it through the governance process and what ETAC's role would be in it 3. SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT- NONE</stromg> 4.PRESENTATION ON SPAM FILTERING - TOM ROZA, ETS SUPERVISOR OF SYSTEMS AND OPERATIONS, PROPOSAL TO CREATE USER ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON SPAM CONTROL · Tom passed out a handout pertaining the Barracuda Spam Firewall · The three objectives Tom wanted to accomplish with his presentation were: 1) Explain why an e-mail firewall was viewed as essential for the District 2) How it was selected and why Barracuda was chosen 3) How it works, and how it has been deployed · There has been concern in the District about the ever-increasing amount of SPAM and e-mail borne virus attacks From January thru September of last year there were 4 major e-mail borne virus attacks that hit the District and resulted in a significant loss of productivity · Currently our e-mail traffic goes through Send Mail, which has very limited capabilities for controlling or managing e-mail It is basically a mail transfer agent It was felt that a District wide e-mail system was needed that supplemented or augmented the current e-mail service · There are filtering mechanisms in the e-mail clients, but users would need to be reasonably savvy technically, and the burden for managing it would fall on the user It also requires a certain amount of time to stay ahead of the viruses and spam · This fall ETS reviewed a number of products to help us manage the mail that is coming into our District · The requirements used to help select a product were: 1) It needed to contain both spam & virus control 2) It needed to be an enterprise solution which is centrally managed 3) The cost could not be prohibitive 4) Had to be easy to install and configure with low maintenance 5) Needed to have automatic spam & virus pattern updates as they are discovered · Found a product, "Spam Firewall" from Barracuda Networks, which met the criteria It has a spam firewall appliance - a self-contained piece of equipment. It is a server that has a proprietary operating system, disk space & is solely provided by the vendor, which sits on the outer boundary of our network. Our e-mail is directed to it. All inbound mail goes through it. The District was able to evaluate it, at no cost, for 5 weeks, unlike some of the other vendors who wanted signed agreements or some financial commitment up front The appliance was put on the network during winter break It does not track internal e-mail Any out bound e-mails, sent from within the District, do not go through the spam firewall Only manages inbound traffic with the FHDA, Deanza and Foothill domains There are also mail servers on the campuses that are supported by various departments, are not controlled by ETS, and do not have their mail routed through the spam firewall client In five weeks, it processed over 500,000 e-mails During the evaluation period, the e-mail service showed no degradation in performance Approximately 52,300 e-mails were detected containing viruses Based upon how the product worked, and its effectiveness dealing with the variation of the SoBig virus and the myDoom virus, it was felt that the product sold itself · Barracuda has a one-time license fee for the appliance and two subscription fees The subscription fee for the spam and virus pattern updates, is $700 the other subscription fee for the appliance is also $700 - the $1,400 is an on-going, annual fee, which is covered by the ETS budget The one-time license fee for the appliance is $4,000 · Barracuda has been in existence for two years, with 120 appliances installed ETS spoke to three of their customers, 2 commercial and 1 educational institution · Each e-mail message and attachment is scanned using over 800 pattern detection elements, which get updated every hour The pattern detection elements are indicators of what might be spam or a virus The appliance scans the subject; scans all the header information in the e-mail, where it came from, looks at the subject, looks at the content and looks at the attachment (not really for the content specifically) - it is looking for the presence or absence of situations in the header; it scores each of the elements it finds; based upon the scoring threshold, the e-mail will either be delivered unaltered, tagged with {BULK}, quarantined or blocked (not delivered) · There was a strong recommendation by Barracuda that internal mail not be sent through the appliance for performance reasons, because the mass majority of mail is internal All mail sent within the district should be scanned by other methods Desktops should have virus protection that is updated frequently and set to quarantine infected attachments as soon as they are detected · E-mails are quarantined or blocked if they contain pornography, violence or acts of racism · There is the capability of sending a message to the recipient if an e-mail is quarantined due to a virus. If the message is blocked, there is an option to notify the sender · If the appliance finds a virus, the attachment is removed and an e-mail is delivered to the recipient with a notification that the virus removal action was performed · Quarantined messages are retained and are examined to help update what is allowed · A request has been put in with Barracuda to allow quarantined messages to be viewed by the recipient · There have been some complaints regarding possible bounced mail ETS is trying to determine if things are getting bounced that should not have been bounced · Current compliance standards are based upon: a variety of industry standards, legislation (things that have gone through state and federal legislatures) · ETS would like to get guidance from ETAC to know what should be blocked or what should not be blocked · The capability exists to send a message to the sender, that their e-mail was not delivered. At this time that feature has been disabled, primarily because of our research while talking to other Barracuda customers. The research done on the Internet, indicates that spam/virus control software is one of the biggest contributors of spam when messages are sent to users about their message · A firewall can be taught what is or is not spam "Unauthorized Lists": Discards all e-mail matching the criteria contained in the list "Authorized Lists": Delivers any e-mail matching the criteria contained in the list · Need to notify ETS if you don't want [BULK] in a message, meaning the e-mail is not spam · There will be an article in the next NewsBytes on how to notify ETS if something is, or is not spam There will be an email addresses created for messages that are spam (thisisSPAM@fhda.edu) and those that users think are not spam (thisisNOTspam@fhda.edu), so it can be forwarded to one or the other and ETS can sort it all out · Kim suggested that it would be good for Tom Roza to be present at the next meeting for the discussion on whether or not an advisory committee on SPAM should be created. Tom indicated that he could attend that meeting. 5. STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS - (1) REVIEW DRAFT VISION STATEMENT, (2) BREAK UP INTO GROUPS AND FOCUS ON OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES · No time for discussion · Will try to review at the next ETAC meeting 6. OTHER ITEMS FROM THE COMMITTEE · Carole Chapman was thanked for the many years she served on the ETAC committee · Scott Heffner inquired if ETS is looking into ways of distributing software upgrades over the network XP has that capability and ETS is looking into ways with Win2000 Currently looking into some tools for the PC Have not been looking into tools for the Mac because as soon as you go onto the network with OS X, it automatically looks for any software updates, plus the security issues are not as great · Linda Elvin was introduced as Carole Chapman's replacement on the ETAC committee Adjourned: 1:56 pm Next Meeting: Wednesday, March 3, 12:30 - 2:00 pm, De Anza Admin Conference Room
	Last Updated: Monday, March 1, 2004 at 5:10:20 PM ©2008 Foothill-De Anza Community College District

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