The mission is not to make life miserable and expensive for operators and thwart communications, but, in the spirit of protecting our nation, to give the FBI and homeland security tools to wire tap (if we can borrow the term) Internet conversation on a moment's notice. We suspect it would be a rare occurrence for a small WISP to receive a warrant to comply, but it would be potentially devastating to security should the means to monitor conversation not be available.

The following Q&A will address NetEqualizer's capabilities in reference to CALEA compliance.

1. Functionally, what does the Netequalizer CALEA release provide?

We provide a network probe with the following capabilities:

• It will allow an ISP or other operator to comply with a basic warrant for information about a user by capturing and sending IP communications in real time to a third party.
• Communication may be captured by headers or headers and content.

2. In what format is the data portion sent to a law enforcement agency?

We will provide basic descriptive tags identifying headers, data, and time stamps, along with HEX or ASCII representation of content data.

3. Do you meet the standards of the receiving law enforcement agency?

The law and specifications on "how" to deliver to a law enforcement agency are somewhat ambiguous. The FBI has created some detailed specifications, but the reality is that there are some 40,000 law enforcement agencies and they are given autonomy on how they receive data. We do provide samples on how to receive NetEqualizer-captured data on a third party server, but are unable to guarantee definite compliance with any specific agency.

4. Does the NetEqualizer do any analysis of the data?

No. We are only providing a probe function.

5. Is the NetEqualizer release fully CALEA compliant?

Although the law (see CALEA sections 103 and 107(a) (2)) is fairly specific on what needs to be done, the how is not addressed to any level of detail to which we can engineer our solution. Many people are following the ATIS specification which was put forth by the FBI, and we have read and attempted to comply with the probe portion of that specification. But, the reality is that there is no one agency given the authority to test a solution and bless it as compliant. So, if faced with a warrant for information, the law enforcement agency in charge may indeed want something in slightly different formats. If this is the case, there may be additional consulting.

As best we can tell at this time, there is no one government agency that can fully declare our technology CALEA compliant. However, we do pledge to work with our customers should they be faced with a warrant for information to adjust and even customize our solution; however additional fees may apply.

For more information on NetEqualizer and CALEA, visit our extended Q&A page at http:// www.netequalizer.com/caleafaq.php. Additional information on CALEA itself can be found at http://www.askcalea.org.

How does this service work?

I use MAC addresses for shaping, why would I use name-based shaping?

In addition, our new technology has tremendous benefits for VoIP users who have in the past struggled to maintain QoS when using a VLAN. With the NetEqualizer, products such as Vonage phones can remain operational even during peak times of bandwidth usage over a VLAN. This new technology will prove especially useful for operators providing Internet service to diverse groups of users such as in office parks and municipalities.

"We have deployed several NetEqualizers in office complexes around the world starting several years ago," said Kris Lamberth, senior partner of Digital Reach, Inc. "We can't say enough on how simple the NetEqualizer is to use and how much easier managing bandwidth has been compared to traditional router-based solutions. The VLAN shaping feature will allow us to provide QoS for each VLAN, which will give us a huge competitive advantage over other IT consulting agencies in our industry."

• Allows for up to 11,000 entries in the connection table
• Allows up to 8,000 hard limits
• Allows minor fixes to connection limits, making them more robust
• Offers support for new license levels
• All OS programs and related drivers were also updated

Note: You may need to upgrade hardware in older versions. Contact sales@apconnections.net for details.

The exact location of the California seminar has yet to be decided, but we are open to suggestions for potential venues. Please let us know if you'd be interested in attending or even hosting the event. We can be contacted at 1-800-918-2763 or via e-mail at admin@apconnections.net.

Although rare, there have been instances of running out of room when turning on additional NTOP reporting tools (beyond what comes enable). Below is a script that can be used to ensure that your NetEqualizer flash memory does not overflow.

The following script text should be saved away to a file called runcheckspace.

runcheckspace 90

This will test disk space when over 90 percent full and kill NTOP if it is running.

To run this forever, you can do:

while true
do
checkspace 90
sleep 60
done

This will run every minute. Should you decide to run unsupported extensions to NTOP or other utilities, this script will give you protection against logs filling up disk space.

#! /usr/bin/perl
##save this perl script as checkspace
@foo=`df`;
@ntop=`ps -ef | grep ntop | grep -v grep`; foreach $line (@foo)
{
chomp($line);
@special = split(" ",$line);
if ($special[0] eq "rootfs" ) {
$sum=$special[2]/$special[1] * 100;
if ($sum > $ARGV[0])
{
print "Warning disk space more than $ARGV[0]
percent full \n";
chomp(@ntop);
$line2 = split(@ntop);
foreach $line2 (@ntop)
{
@special2 = split(" ", $line2);
if ( exists $special2[1] )
{
print "line2 $special2[1] \n";
$result=`kill -9 $special2[1]`;
}
}
}
}
}