How LAN problems can impact on your firewalls

Last week seems to have been a firewall issue week for me. I worked on incidents in two large networks where problems on the LAN managed to bring down firewalls at the edge of the network. Firewalls have come a long way since the original stateless varieties, which were little more than a collection of access control lists. These were superseded by stateful firewalls which kept track of the state of network connections. Modern firewalls are now application aware, you can do things like block access to certain applications or prevent users from using applications like Bittorrent.

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However, these firewalls don't come without their problems. They require lots of computing power to analyze and filter applications as they pass through. On some networks it can be a challenge getting the right balance of application awareness and traffic throughput. The more features you enable, the more stressed your firewall becomes. A lot of firewalls are priced on throughput: the greater the throughput, the greater the price. As a result of this, I see some networks with firewalls that are just about coping due to the costs involved of upgrading to the next model.

One incident I worked on last week was with an Internet service provider (ISP). A couple of their corporate firewalls, which linked their staff networks to the Internet, were resetting themselves. They suspected a resource issue on the firewalls and installed extra memory, but this seemed to make the problem worse. We discovered the source of the problem by looking at the network traffic going from the network core to the firewalls.

We found that large volumes of syslog traffic was being routed to an external IP address. This was unusual as syslog is normally used for managing local networks. We looked at the external IP addresses and saw that they were from an IP range that was once owned by the ISP. They sold it off and updated routing tables. However, nobody checked if any remaining systems were exporting data to this old subnet. Once routing tables were updated the syslog traffic was now sent out via their firewall. This caused an overload and the firewalls reset themselves.

It's an interesting problem caused by the lack of IPV4 address space. A block of addresses is very valuable. For example, earlier this year Microsoft paid $7.5 million to purchase a block of 666,624 IPv4 addresses. If you are looking to change IP addressing on your network, make sure you have monitoring in place so that you can identify what is using the IP addresses and for what reason.

The second incident I looked at involved a large university in Scotland. The connection rate limit on their main firewalls was peaking. This resulted in complaints from network users that connections were dropping or that downloading and uploading was slow.

Networks within educational campuses are typically more open than they would be in a corporate environment. This means that even things like what's on the TV schedules can affect network performance. Applications like Bittorrent can generate large numbers of connections as it downloads small pieces of data from lots of other clients on the Bittorrent network. In the case of this university network, users on their WiFi networks were tunnelling Bittorrent over TCP port 80. This resulted in large amounts of traffic and connections. The firewall rules were updated to only allow 80 parallel connections per IP address and the firewalls stabilized.

I do like the way application aware firewalls are evolving, more awareness of traffic coupled with clever management interfaces. However, no matter what firewall you choose you should be able to see what is going in and out of your network perimeter. Try and do this independently of the firewall, no point in trying to switch on logging or extra diagnostics if it's already stressed out. Knowing what is going in and out of your network can also help prevent network breaches.

Physicians using tablets to treat patients

Within the next year, almost half of all doctors will be using tablets and other mobile devices to perform everyday tasks, such as accessing patient information in electronic medical records (EMRs), according to the survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a nonprofit group.

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Today, a quarter of healthcare providers surveyed say they're using tablets in their practice. Another 21% indicated they expect to do so within a year.

CompTIA's Third Annual Healthcare IT Insights and Opportunities study was based on two seperate online surveys: One focused on 350 doctors, dentists and other healthcare providers or administrators; the other polled 400 IT firms with healthcare IT practices. Both were conducted in late July and early August.

The study shows that more than half of healthcare professionals currently use a smartphone for work, and about a third use their smartphones or tablets to access EMR systems. Another 20% expect to start mobile usage with EMRs within the next year.

The U.S. government is pressing all medical facilities to roll out EHRs by 2016, but the going has been slow so far. By the end of next year, 58% of small physician practices are expected to have EHR systems in place.

By 2014, the federal government wants more than half of all healthcare facilities to use EHRs.

Facilities that roll out the systems -- and prove their meaningful use, according to federal standards -- can receive tens of thousands of dollars in reimbursement money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Some facilities, depending on their size, could get millions.

EHRs are also expected to promote the use of standardized medical practices.

CompTIA's survey also showed EMR system adoption is on the rise, with 38% of healthcare providers indicating they have a comprehensive system in place and 17% saying they have a partial system or module. Sixty-one percent of the EMR said they're generally satisfied with their comprehensive systems.

"That's a respectable figure, but one that also indicates there's room for improvement in areas such as greater ease of use; better interoperability with other systems; faster speeds; improved remote access and mobility features; and more training," CompTIA said.

Doctors have reported feeling like data-entry clerks when typing their own notes into EMR systems. Others are unfamiliar with the technology and see it as yet one more learning curve to conquer in their jobs.

"We're a teaching hospital, so on one end of the spectrum we have residents born with a computer in their hand and so they look at this as an opportunity to move forward; on the other side of the spectrum are the physicians [who] are in their 60s and the very idea of signing onto a computer is a big question mark to them," said Bill Fawns, director of IT services at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, Calif.

Late last year, Kern Medical Center, a 222-bed acute-care teaching hospital, deployed an OpenVista EMR system from Medsphere Systems Corp.

"As mobile devices and applications have become more user-friendly, affordable and powerful, the appeal to businesses of all types, including healthcare providers, has grown exponentially," Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTIA, said in a statement.

The survey also touched on the adoption of cloud computing in the healthcare industry. The results showed cloud computing is clearly in its early stages, with 57% indicating they were not very familiar with the technology and just 5% stating they were using cloud services.

"It's worth noting, though, that some healthcare providers are likely using cloud-based applications, like software-as-a-service, and not thinking of it as cloud computing," the report stated.

The potential for its growth is strong. A key component of EMR meaningful use standards is the ability to share information, either through proprietary networks or through regional Health Information Exchanges, which will include many of the elements of cloud computing.

Adoption of telemedicine, where physicians consult with patients with teleconferencing, is still a ways off, the report said. Recent studies have shown that patients can be just as effectively treated through telemedicine as through traditional in-person visits. In fact, studies have shown telemedicine actually improves patient-physician communication.

Hoewever, just 14% of healthcare professionals reported actively following news and trends in telemedicine, according to CompTIA's survey.

Those surveyed indicated they saw the greatest benefits of telemedicine in the areas of continuing medical education (61%), specialist referral services (44%) and patient consultations (37%). Only one in 10 healthcare providers surveyed say they intend to use video conferencing for patient interaction within the next 12 months.

The next generation of live support chat software

Although it may be hard to believe, life support software that allows customers and browsers to chat to each other over the web has actually been around for almost 15 years now. The main difference is the fact that now more companies are using it which has helped raise the profile of live support chat software a great deal as business people are realizing that it is still one of the top tools for communicating with consumers and offering them instant support as well as the satisfaction of knowing they are working with a real agent.

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In fact, live support software is so popular that the US Army even uses a live support chat software device in order to help answer potential recruits’ questions as well as military families that are looking for help with reassignment, deployment, and assistance questions. With this much success backing live support chat software, it should come as little surprise then that there is now a new generation of live support chat software that is slowly rolling out helping to make the software much easier to utilise from a business point of view and much more pleasing to use from a customer’s point of view.


The major problems with live support software right now is that in some instances it still lacks the human touch despite the fact that humans are actually the one’s doing the chatting. This is due to the fact that most companies want to optimise the agents that they hire to staff their live support chat software, therefore they have agents that handle five or more conversations at a time which can lead to inaccuracies in grammar and delayed responses. This can leave some more picky browsers disgruntled with live support software and the entire experience.

However, the new generation of live support chat software aims to solve this by cutting out live agents altogether thereby somewhat making the name ironic, but getting the job done in a much more efficient manner. In the place of live agents on the other side of the live support software is a virtual employer that relies on virtual intelligence to answer questions and get the job done with the programming to make sure that the customer gets perfect grammar every time along with a rapid fast response. Surprisingly enough, this software seems to be catching on as those who use live support chat software with this option seem quite pleased with the results.


From a business point of view, the use of a virtual agent that is able to be programmed to respond like a live human agent is obvious. The average chat over a live support software service will last 18 minutes, out of which five minutes are spent by the customer waiting for the next available representative. However, a virtual agent can respond right away eliminating the need for any wait and allowing the live support chat software to live up to its rep as an instant form of customer service.

Next, continuing the business point of view, bear in mind that you do not have to pay the virtual agent anything for its time, reducing the costs of actual hiring agents to staff your live support software or attempting to man it on your own. For those who receive a high volume of chat requests, this is an excellent choice given the average cost of a chat is considered to be five dollars per session all things considered. Plus, as always, if the virtual agent gets stuck the live chat can be turned over to a real human so that you do have to worry about losing a customer but can easily streamline the live support software service in most cases on your website cheaply and effectively.