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Network Operations Center (NOC) FAQ's1) Where can I find information about OARnet outages and planned maintenance? Answers1) Where can I find information about OARnet outages and planned maintenance? 2) Does OARnet want to know if I am doing maintenance on my campus? 3) What are some of the benefits of Statscout?
4) Which site should I go to if I want to view my weekly bandwidth utilization? 5) What if my device is not advertised on the Statscout web page? 6) How do I view my daily/weekly/monthly bandwidth utilization reports? If you wish to get a graph for all of your interfaces quickly without having to worry about formatting, you may select a time period using the Historical Reports pull-down menu, and then clicking on Utilization Graphs, which is underneath the Port Reports section of the Real-Time Reports page (left side of the Network Monitor Console). If you wish to view statistics for a specific port/s in detail, you may select your device (using the Device List), and then click on the gray button at the top of the console that says “Graphs”. This will open up another window. In this window, you will notice a Port List. This will list all the ports on your device. Select the port/s you wish to view statistics for (Use Ctrl+click to select multiple values), the day, month, and year of the graph using the Graphing Options pull-down menu, and the Settings. Here is a brief description of the settings that Statscout allows you to use: Delay Times – Displays delay times along the port Tx Utilization % - Displays traffic going out of the designated port Rx Utilization % - Displays traffic coming into the designated port Average Delay – Displays a line indicating the average delay times Average Tx% - Displays a line indicating the average amount of traffic going out of the designated port. Average Rx% - Displays a line indicating the average amount of traffic coming into the designated port. Thresholds: Displays the threshold of the designated port. PVC CIR% - Displays PVC Committed Information Rate statistics Bytes – Displays byte counts for the designated port Frames – Displays frame counts for the designated port Errors – Displays error counts for the designated port Discards – Displays discard counts Fecn/Becn – Displays Fecn/Becn information Tabular – Displays average Receive and Transmit percentages, Bytes, Frames, Errors, Discards, and FECN/BECN information in a table format. Show Grid – Displays a grid on the graph in order to make the graphs easier to read. Once you have done all of these things, you must actually create the graph. In order to create the graph, you will need to do a few things. First, select the days of the week that you would like to view on the graph (if selecting more than one day). You will then need to format your graph using the Scales tool. If you have an interface that is rate-limited (i.e. you do not have a full DS3, T1, etc.), you can change the maximum percentage (the y-axis) of the graph. This is done using the Utilization pull-down menu. Click on the maximum percentage of the graph you wish to view, and it will be set. The graph can also be enlarged for easier reading using the Zoom pull-down menu. Once these things have been done, you can choose the period of time that the graph will cover. Statscout allows you to view your statistics in a variety of ways. Clicking on the Day option under the Create Graph box will bring up a graph with your selected Settings for the day that was chosen using the Graphing Options. Clicking on the Month option will bring up a graph for the month that was chosen via Graphing Options, showing a separate graph for each day. The Strip option will show one graph for the entire month, with Days along the bottom of the graph. Year will show one graph for the whole year that was selected with the Graphing Options pull-down menu. 7) How do I read the graphs? Utilization (%) – Receive (blue solid line), Transmit (red solid line) Average Utilization (%) – Receive (blue dotted line), Transmit (red dotted line) Total – Receive (blue solid), Transmit (red solid) Specified Range – Receive (blue w/ lighter blue solid), Transmit (red w/ pink solid) PVC CIR – Solid fuchsia line Threshold – Dotted fuchsia line Network Delay (ms) – Solid green line Average Network Delay – Dotted green line 8) What if I have a rate-limited interface? 9) Is there any way that I may keep the graphs for future reference? 10) What are the guidelines for OARnet members who have video service through you? 11) How can I sign up for H.323 video bridging service and what are the cost involved? 12) We do our own video. Can you offer any tips on making it the best possible experience? 13) Does OARnet have a standard list of ports to block? 14) How do you request a port to be block? 15) OARnet blocked a port on the router because of an attack that is affecting the entire school network. What is the next step? If it is an outbound attack, we will determine the IP address initiating the attack so that it can be shut off by an administrator of that school. Beyond shutting off access to stop the attack, it is up to the school how it handles the person responsible for the attack. If it is an inbound attack and blocking the port or blocking access to IP address being attacked has not maintained the problem an OARnet engineer can proceed with blocking the port or IP address on the core router. Current OARnet policy for core router blocks is to leave the block in place for 24 hours or until the attack subsides. This can be changed or augmented to fit the needs of the school. 16) What’s a forward DNS? 17) What’s a reverse DNS? A special PTR-record type is used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of a PTR-record is the IP address with the segments reversed + ".in-addr.arpa". For example the reverse DNS entry for IP 1.2.3.4 would be stored as a PTR-record for "4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa". Reverse DNS is different from forward DNS in who points (delegates) the zone to your DNS server. Without this delegation from your ISP, your reverse zone will not work. 18) Why do they need to match up? What happens if they don't match up? Reverse DNS is mostly used by humans for such things as tracking where a web-site visitor came from, or where an email message originated etc. This tracking is important because some machines require authentication and need to know what IP came from where. Forward and reverse Zones are two separate zones files not necessarily hosted on the same nameservers. Typically, for every A record there should be a corresponding PTR record but this is not always the case. 19) Can a zone file consist of more than one MX or A record? Mail.example.edu 86400 IN A 192.168.10.1 And an MX record such as example.edu 86400 IN MX 10 mail.example.edu this means that any mail destined to say user@example.com must send it to mail.example.com which has an IP address of 192.168.10.1 and a priority of 10. You can have more than one MX record (more than one mailserver) with different priorities. 20) Is it possible for me to keep OARnet as my primary DNS and someone else be the secondary? |
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