The software updates to be added later this afternoon will mostly be transparent to users, but there is one change that we have been awaiting.  firefox will be upgraded from the 3.0 series to the 3.6 series.  The most noticeable change will probably be that tab opening behaves a little differently.  According to http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/01/firefox-new-tab-behavior-to-be-updated/:

Currently, when you open a link in a new tab it is added to the end of the tab bar, and the relationship with its parent tab exists only in the user’s head. I usually have to move it closer to the original tab to avoid tab scrolling.

With the new behavior, new tabs opened from a tab will be added to the right of the parent tab, unless there is already a child tab. In this case it is added to the right of the last child tab.

New tabs opened via the new tab button, File/New Tab… menu, Ctrl + T, etc. will still be opened to the end of the tab bar, as it is not possible to know if it’s contents will be related to the current tab or not.

This new version of firefox also supports HTML5 video tags so that some video will be automatically viewable in the browser without the need of an external application.  There will be no sound for browsers opened on coxeter, but if you have a personal machine with speakers configured then video and audio could work on some videos (admittedly most videos are not yet in HTML5 format yet).

Finally, if you look at the “People” page on our departmental website with this newer browser the background colour of alternate lines is different, which makes reading easier.

In order to lessen the risk to the departmental systems, the local departmental networking on the sixth floor of Bahen will be disabled starting at 3pm on Wednesday June 23 and will be restored on Monday June 28 (we expect that connectivity will be restored by the normal start of that day).  This means that, for example, office machines and the machines in BA6200 will not be networked.  The departmental servers (coxeter, mail, www, wiki, and blog) should all remain accessible from outside Bahen, if there are no problems.

There is a potential security issue with viewing flash content inside PDF documents when using “acroread”, so such viewing has been temporarily disabled on coxeter.

The new security certificates are now on our mail server.

1) For information about how to configure Thunderbird to use this see:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/cms/thunderbird-setup/

2) If you are already using Thunderbird then you can make two minor changes which are described here:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/cms/tweaking-thunderbird-for-new-certificates/

(you may have to re-enter your passwords for the incoming and outgoing mail servers since their names have changed).

3) If you use webmail be sure to use:

https://mail.math.toronto.edu/

4) For Mac Mail users the minor changes are the same as for Thunderbird described at the link above:  you need to use mail.math.toronto.edu as the incoming mail server and smtp.math.toronto.edu as the outgoing mail server.

The department now has security certificates for our servers that are signed (in an authority chain) by StartCom Ltd, which are accepted by most modern browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari) and modern email clients (such as Thunderbird).  The certificates have been tested on blog.math.toronto.edu, wiki.math.toronto.edu, and www.math.toronto.edu and are currently working fine there.  If you try to securely access these servers using “utoronto.ca” instead of “toronto.edu” at the end of the server address then you will get warning messages about the certificate being valid for “toronto.edu” only.

We have also tested using the new certificates for our mailserver (for webmail and IMAPS access, and even for “pine”) and things are working well, although minor reconfiguration of the way email is accessed (always use the “toronto.edu” forms instead of “utoronto.ca” forms) will give a nicer user experience and we will document how to do that before we switch to the new certificates (probably early next week).  We will make local changes for “pine” and for the webmail link on our homepage.

The URL, http://wireless.utoronto.ca/using,  has some useful information for configuring wireless networking at UofT.  We use the UofT wireless network in various sites on campus where our users are located.