IT Status (Dept of Mathematics, U of Toronto)
A phishing email, purporting to come from:
“notification@math.toronto.edu” <pgomez1988@gmail.com>
and with message:
This is an impromptu notification, download the attached PDF file and reply to this email.
has been sent to some people in the department. Please delete it without opening the PDF file.
Due to transformer work starting at 5pm on August 17, 2011 there is a small possibility that some UofT email and network service may be disrupted.
Here is the advisory that was issued:
Notice of potential disruption to central email and network services
Construction of the new central administrative data centre in the McLennan Physics building will include a transformer replacement. In preparation, it is necessary to re-feed one of the three Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) units in the existing data centre from a different power source.
While we have undertaken extensive preparatory work in advance of the cutover, there nevertheless remains an element of risk in the event that the UPS does not automatically switch to battery power as it should. If that were to occur, devices powered solely from this UPS would lose power. Some of the services that could be affected include: UTORmail, Exchange, Campus Wireless & GTAnet access. To increase the amount of battery backup time available for the electricians to do their work, we may also need to shutdown some customer-facing components of UTORmail during the cutover and in order to reduce the risks associated with an uncontrolled shutdown.
We will be conducting the electrical cutover on Wednesday August 17th starting at 5pm.
Although everything will be done to reduce the chance of users experiencing any service interruption at all, we wish to give you advance notice to permit you to make scheduling adjustments that would reduce the impact if an outage occurred. We will send out a follow-up message to advise when the electrical work is complete.
If you have any questions or concerns about this work, please send an email to the Network Operations Centre: net-ops@noc.utoronto.ca
There was a security problem with xrdb that Red Hat tried to fix. The security problem is apparently fixed, but they introduced a new bug and X resource files are not properly being read now. The problem has been reported and we hope they will fix this new bug soon.
The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, and blog/wiki servers will have some software updates applied today (Wednesday afternoon, April 13, 2011) which will require rebooting. Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading without bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.
