Dedicated Cyberinfrastructure Resources for COVID19 Research
The National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System (NICIS) is availing resources to research or data analysis that is dedicated to efforts of combating COVID-19.
Updates
TENET’s Service Support Continuity – COVID19 Lockdown
Please continue to log all incidents and service requests as normal to support@tenet.ac.za or by calling +27 21 763 7147 which will be routed to our employees working from home.
New instance of Filesender – a secure service to share large files with anyone
SANReN has implemented the latest version of Filesender, a
Below are the guidelines for accessing the service and what values it adds to your day to day operations.
What problem does the service solve?
You need to send a file larger than a couple of megabytes to someone and the e-mail comes back indicating: “attachment too big” or “mailbox too full”, that is where FileSender comes in handy.
How do I use the service?
Upon logging in, you are presented with a user-friendly interface. You
The service is integrated with the South African Identity Federation, which provides a pool of institutions you can authenticate from to use the service. If your institution is not registered on SAFIRE as yet, you can login with a social media account if you are from an eligible institution.
Where do I access the service?
Drop us an e-mail at sysadmin@sanren.ac.za for any queries regarding the service.
SA NREN Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) pilot
Last year we issued a call asking “Can we help you move your data sets?” to find potential use cases for our new data transfer service (see flyer).
We have since set up three Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria that are now available to the South African Research and Education community to assist in data transfer movement nationally and internationally as a pilot project on a trial basis.
If you would like to know more about this project, make use of these DTNs to transfer large datasets to and from your institution or know of a project that could benefit from utilising this service, please email engage@sanren.ac.za
For those that already completed our investigation survey, thank you for doing so, as this helped us motivate for the pilot project. Please do reach out to us again if you are still interested.
SANReN PERT Team (pert@sanren.ac.za)
Changes to eduroam
There’s recently been a lot of bad news about network congestion, etc. So I thought it was time to share some good news :-). Over the last couple of months, we have made a number of changes and improvements to the South African eduroam roaming service.
Most significantly, last night we completed the replacement the two federation-level roaming (FLR) servers. More than simply an upgrade, this change represents a complete change in architecture, different hardware, and different physical locations. The new architecture has four instances (two active; two standby) of the FLR servers in two different cities (Cape Town & Jo’burg), providing both geographic redundancy and improved resiliency. Fail-over between the active and standby instances is handled by BGP route announcements, and should typically take no more than a few seconds.
We’ve also introduced some courtesy monitoring as an experimental service. This has already helped three institutions detect problems that would have prevented their users from being able to roam successfully. In future, it will hopefully provide institutional help desks with better insight into what happens when their users are roaming on another campus and help them to be more proactive about problems with their service. You can find out about the monitoring system and the status of your realm at https://eduroam.ac.za/status/.
The infrastructure changes should (hopefully) make the eduroam roaming service more reliable, which is important since South Africa now sees in excess of 165,000 inter-institutional authentications a day. I’m hoping to be able to make some stats available in due course.
The web page at https://eduroam.ac.za/ has been updated, and we’ve introduced several new features. Institutional administrators can now update their site details, and in doing so provide end users more accurate information about what to expect when roaming (the data provided on the South African eduroam website also feeds eduroam.org and the monitoring system). Administrators can now also self-provision for eduroam CAT — the configuration assistant tool that provides a simple on-boarding installer to help end users configure their devices. Institutions are strongly encouraged to take advantage of CAT to make connecting to eduroam easier for their users. (See https://cat.eduroam.org/ for more info.)
All of these changes were made as part of the service handover from the SANReN Competency Area to TENET, and represent a join effort by both teams and the culmination of many months of cooperation to ensure a seamless transition. I’d particularly like to thank Simeon Miteff and Johan Hugo for their significant contributions.
Please note that TENET is now responsible for maintaining the infrastructure underlying the eduroam service. This means that going forward you should report service problems via the TENET SOC.
– Guy
Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET)
SA NREN CSIRT Update
The SANReN Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) have been working hard to get the proactive CSIRT services operational. We launched our website, in November.
Currently, we offer vulnerability assessments and announcements services. This includes one free vulnerability scan per institution valid until end September 2017. To make use of this offer, please email the following requested information to csirt@sanren.ac.za.
Over the next 3-6 months, we will be refining our announcements service. Look out for some exciting developments – e.g. customised vulnerability feeds and a CSIRT launch event / follow-up workshop.
We will be working closely with TENET this year to formalise the reactive services and complete the portfolio for CSIRT as well as partner with other (and especially NREN) CSIRTs around the world.
To subscribe to our mailing list (open to customers/beneficiaries of the NREN and supporting organisations), please send an email to csirt-news+subscribe@sanren.ac.za. Reply to the confirmation email and we’ll approve/verify.
To register a security contact for your site or institution, please send an email to csirt@sanren.ac.za.
For any other CSIRT-related queries or assistance please email csirt@sanren.ac.za. Feel free to provide input on what you’d like to see from the CSIRT.