Special server updates at 4:15pm on Friday, January 5, 2018

As you may have read recently two critical vulnerabilities in most modern processors have been announced. They are called Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown only affects Intel processors and there is a patch for our systems that became available shortly after we restarted our systems after last night’s power outage. We will be applying the Meltdown patch tomorrow afternoon, hence an unusual Friday downtime is scheduled. It is unclear when Spectre will be fixed.

An update of coxeter and the mail, web, and public servers will be applied and they will be rebooted starting at approximately 4:15pm tomorrow Friday, January 5. We expect that the servers will be back up around 4:45pm if there are no unforeseen problems.

www upgrade in progress…blogs temporarily unavailable

Latest UTmail+ news

According to UofT:

LATEST UPDATE TO CURRENT OUTAGE: (May 3rd, 2017 – 11:00 AM)

This is an update to the community in regards to the ongoing efforts to restore UTmail+ service. Microsoft has escalated the severity of the UTmail+ service issues to CRITICAL and is working to restore service as soon as possible.

At this time, Microsoft is unable to provide us with a service restoration timeline. The original target for restoration for Wednesday, May 3rd morning will not be met by Microsoft’s team. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing to UTmail+ users.

Once this information is available we will post it immediately. Thank you for your ongoing patience.

Please see http://www.systemstatus.utoronto.ca/ for the latest updates.

short mail server update at 4:15pm on Wednesday January 25, 2017

The departmental mail server will have software updates applied starting at 4:15pm today (Wednesday, January 25, 2017) which will require rebooting.  Since some updates will be applied while the mail server is still up there may be some temporary issues with some software and connectivity.  We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing the mail server 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 mail system to be back up by 4:30pm.

Email is intermittently disconnecting when busy

We are aware of a problem where the email system stops allowing connections when it gets busy.  We are investigating this.

Email system update underway

The email system update is underway.  It is taking somewhat longer than expected and will probably be up by 1pm.

Fake Blackboard login page

The Academic Technologies Director at UofT has asked that the following information be disseminated.

We have been alerted to attempts by hackers to target UofT students with fake “Blackboard” prompts, which redirect to a fake Blackboard login page. This could include receiving an email that says you have an important course announcement or assignment due.
The real UofT Blackboard can only be accessed via the UTWeblogin page. Also, always make sure that the URL says portal.utoronto.ca, and NOT blackboard.edu, or any other URL.
If you think you may have inadvertently typed your UtorID credentials into a fake version of Blackboard, please contact the Information Commons asap for assistance in resetting your credentials: help.desk@utoronto.ca

“Transaction complete” subject lines on utoronto.ca phishing emails

    Currently there are many phishing emails which are being sent
to University of Toronto accounts (including departmental
accounts) with the subject line:

        Transaction complete

These emails are originating from compromised University of
Toronto accounts (so the messages appear to be more legitimate
than usual phishing attacks) and are arriving from "utoronto.ca"
addresses.  The message tries to get users to give up their
username and password.

    In our default configuration our spam filter has flagged
every such message sent to our department (they were appearing in
INBOX and SuspectedSpam folders flagged as "SPAM:###", but are
now flagged as "VIRUS DETECTED" and automatically deleted).
Please delete any such messages without opening them.

mail server will be going down today at 4:15pm

The mail server will be going down this afternoon at 4:15pm along with the other servers to upgrade the disks.  It should be up by 5pm.

Google access seems to have been restored

Access to google.com and google.ca seems to be working normally again.