Centrenet scheduled maintenance
Centrenet will be taken offline tonight (July 10th, 2008) starting at 9:00PM EDT for a round of scheduled maintenance, as we prepare for the upcoming academic year. We expect to have the service back up within a few hours.
Any further updates, should they be necessary, will be delivered as updates to this post.
7/10/2008 10:05PM Update: All maintenance and upgrades are now complete. Total downtime was slightly less than an hour.
Summer Projects: Chowan
Chowan, the new temporary home of Centre’s dinning services was opened for operations June 22, 2008. Information Technology Services’ part of the facility was providing cabling and equipment for voice and data.
We installed 1 Cisco 3560 24 port PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch as well as two Cisco 1242 A/G wireless access points. The switch is connected by fiber optic cable to both of Centre’s core backbone switches located in McReynolds Hall and Olin Hall at 1Gbit speed. ITS also provided IP and analog phone service for the building though our network backbone. The Sodexho staff will have access to wired and wireless data, while the students will be able to access Centre’s network service though wireless while visiting Chowan.
New Scam Email
There’s a new email making the rounds that wants some “verification information” to setup some random email account. Surprise! It’s is a scam. A copy of the message is below. You can ignore safely ignore it should it arrive in your inbox.
BEGIN SCAM EMAIL>>>
NOTE: Reply all mails to- accountupgradedept@live.com
ACCOUNT UPGRADE TEAMFINAL VERIFICATION OF YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT
VERIFY YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT NOW
Dear webmail Account Owner,
This message is from upgrade team messaging center to all our webmail
account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and webmail account
center. We are deleting all our webmail accounts to create more space for new
accounts.To prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below
so that we will know that it’s a presently used account.
We have been sending this notice to all our webmail account owners and this is
the last notice/verification exercise.CONFIRM YOUR WEBMAIL IDENTITY BELOWEmail Username : ………. …..
EMAIL Password : …………….
Date of Birth : ……………..
Country or Territory : ……….Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account
within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account
permanently. Thank you for using our webmail
Warning Code:VX2G99AAJ
Thanks,
Account Upgrade TeamNOTE: Reply all mails to- accountupgradedept@live.com
<<<END SCAM EMAILOrginally written by Seth Thompson of Centre College’s Information Technology Services
Callisto server outage: resolved
Earlier today we detected an attack on our secondary web server Callisto, which powers a handful of services to the campus (blogs, wikis, surveys and the CTL equipment reservations system). We quickly isolated the threat and disabled access until we were sure the server was protected. (more…)
Delivery Failure and Undelivered Messages
We’ve received several emails and calls from various members of the Centre community over recent days about a rash of “Delivery failure” and “Undelivered” email messages. Sometimes these are in a foreign language (Russian is the most popular), and sometimes they aren’t. Some are getting just a handful, others get 30 or 40 (like me!), and some have as many as 150 (!) messages showing up in their Inbox. We wanted to send out a note to let everyone know what was going on.
The short answer: It’s a bunch of spammers. (more…)
Planned downtime: Academic Database server
The Jenzabar-CX Administrative Database server will be down for approximately 4 hours on Saturday evening, 4 pm until 8 pm, for system hardware upgrades.This outage will affect CentreNet and other applications that interface with the academic database.
Wireless Wireless Wireless
With the addition of more wireless coverage in our residential halls, I don’t want to use the term “complete coverage”, we’ve had an amazing uptake in use of our wireless network. During last year the highest number of wireless clients connected was around 300, this year it has topped 600. This has lead to more questions and time spent managing the wireless network. (more…)
Development Office Server Upgrade
Today we worked with Sage Software, makers of Millennium, to move the Development office’s database system to new hardware. The old (very old) system had suffered a disk failure earlier in the summer and since it was about time for an upgrade, we moved it to our VMware based virtual server environment.
The move has seemed to go well, I provided a pre-configured server using Windows 2003 R2 and MSSQL server 2000 (required for this install), the tech from Sage has done most of the work of moving the database from the old system and installing and configuring all the software. We will be keeping the IP address and name of the server the same, when the work is done the goal is for the end user to connect to the system without seeing anything different.
The move to Windows 2003 R2 from Windows 2000 Server should provide a gain in security with the deprecation of Windows 2000 Server soon by Microsoft. Also the move to our virtual environment should see a gain in efficiency of resource use.
Hey, What is ITS going to do with this blog?
Well, the plan is for ITS to use this space to provide information on the day to day operations of our office and on the IT services of Centre College’s campus. We will have everything from general musings to news an announcements.
We will be updating the Helpdesk web site soon and will include information automatically from this blog into the new site using RSS feeds. In addition to posts from this blog, the documentation section of the Helpdesk site will be replaced by links to our department’s new wiki. We hope the new wiki, which can be found here, will be a better way to provide information on all forms of campus IT issues.