Redbricks Intranet Collective (RIC)

Since 14th April Internet access speed has been much improved. It is now possible at quiet times to get 6Mb/s (780kB/s) all for yourself. However it's more likely at other times for us to get 2Mb/s shared among a number of people. We've also altered the traffic shaping algorithm so with these things combined you'll find the speed available to each person is now far faster than it was previously. 2Mb/s still isn't fast enough so we continue to investigate.

On 5/4/9 we moved our Internet service provider from the Phone Co-op to Zen Internet, and the Internet access point from Humberstone Ave to Rockdove Ave.

Moving to Zen Internet should mean faster Internet access but that isn't yet happening - we're investigating. No change is required on your part other than if you used the Phone Co-op SMTP server to send email out through you'll need to change that to Zen Internet's mailhost.zen.co.uk.

Moving the access point to Rockdove means your computer using a different route across the estate to the Internet. No change is required on your part.

Internet access is now very slow at night so we're moving to a different provider to speed things up.

22/12/8
The captive portal, the system to allow only paid-up subscribers to login to use the Internet, has been changed so as to be more robust. You will now be asked to re-login once a week.

21/12/8
The bandwidth shaping we use to prevent those using peer2peer software from consuming too much of the Internet access, had been set to allow peer2peer a proportion of the 7Mb/s Internet bandwidth we used to have. But currently our Internet service provider is capping us at 1Mb/s. Thus the ratio we give to peer2peer has been set too high. It's now been lowered.

A new malware attack is going around the Internet where by an infected computer on the estate could persuade other computers on the estate to use a rogue DNS (domain name system) server, rather than RIC's DNS server.

If this happens to your computer you could have an instance where you think you're going to your bank's web site but instead you've gone to a fake version of their site and have your username and password stolen.

Squid, a proxy server service, has been installed on the estate's firewall to help speed up Internet usage and reduce bandwidth consumption.

"Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages".

Squid is installed transparently, meaning you don't have to make any changes to your computer, it's just working in the background on an RIC computer.

If you see any negative side effects then get in touch.

Some people have been having trouble uploading files to Flickr (a photo sharing site), with it either taking a long time to upload, or uploads failing altogether. This may be a more widespread issue but this is the symptom that's been reported so far.

On 22/11/8, in an effort to fix this, a firewall optimisation change has been made, going from 'normal' to 'conservative' , where conservative "tries to avoid dropping any legitimate connections at the expense of increased memory usage and CPU utilization".