IT Status (Dept of Mathematics, U of Toronto)
A phishing email, purporting to come from:
“ithelp_webmasterhelp@math.toronto.edu” <pgomez1988@gmail.com>
and with message:
Attached to this email in PDF format are updates about your email.
has been sent to some people in the department. Please ignore it.
mathematica on sphere is temporarily not working. A new mathematica license file was supposed to have been sent and another request was made. It is expected that the file will arrive later today or tomorrow.
Starting yesterday evening people in the department were sent a spam email (of the spear phishing variety) with a Subject line that read “News Update” with an unusual URL in the body of the message and which purportedly was sent by Beverley (it was not sent by her). Please just delete that message.
MathWorks is hosting a free MATLAB seminar on Wednesday, June 27, 2012 in Bahen Centre, Room 1130. Please see:
http://www.mathworks.com/seminars/UofT2012
to register and for more information.
The latest version of matlab (R2012a) is now available on sphere. You can run:
matlab
to access it, or if you would rather not use the GUI, then:
matlab -nojvm
will give a simple command-line interface.
It seems that the University’s antivirus webpage has already changed. Now they are recommending that Windows users use Immunet from Sourcefire on machines that are owned by the University but which are not part of the Microsoft Campus agreement (there is a separate charge for that).
If you prefer not to use a cloud-based solution then the Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection 2012 mentioned in the previous blog entry is a relatively inexpensive solution.
It is possible to get a Microsoft Campus Agreement (software) license for approximately $70/year which includes an antivirus product from them if you prefer. Please send an email to requests@math.toronto.edu for more information.
Linux users do not need to install antivirus software, since that platform is very seldom compromised that way.
The University of Toronto’s subscription to Symantec Endpoint Protection has expired and will not be renewed (so the software engine will stop being upgraded, eventually leaving machines vulnerable). Please see http://antivirus.utoronto.ca/ for more information from the people at the Licensed Software Office (there are links for Antivirus for Students and Antivirus for Faculty & Staff).
On personally owned computers running Windows it is simplest to download Microsoft Security Essentials from Microsoft, uninstall the Symantec software, and then install the Security Essentials.
On other computers there is a some free software that they recommend, or you can purchase Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection 2012 which can be purchased through UShop. The cost is $3.25 per user/device per 12 month period. It has been placed under the following category:
Software > Microsoft > Microsoft Servers > System Center Endpoint Protection (Forefront)
It also should be installed after removing the Symantec software.
For Apple OSX computers they recommend downloading the free ClamXav anti-virus software.
We will be shutting down the various departmental machines starting on Monday at 4pm with the client machines. The servers will be brought down later (between 5pm and 10pm). During the power shutdown there will be no wired network access to or from the department until the power is restored and various servers are restarted.
The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, June 6, 2012 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). 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 before 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.
The power is back on in the Earth Sciences building and the main server and printer there are back online.
