There is a scheduled power outage for Bahen in the early morning on Tuesday June 5, 2012 from 3:00am until 7:00am.  We will be shutting down the various departmental machines starting on Monday afternoon/evening.  This means that all the main departmental servers will be down and there will be no wired network access to or from the department until the power is restored and various servers are restarted.  Please ensure that any personal machines are protected as well.  The departmental machines should be back up on Tuesday morning.

There is a scheduled power outage for the Earth Sciences building on Sunday May 27, 2012 from 9:30am until 2:30pm.  We will be shutting down the various departmental machines over there starting on Friday evening.  This means that the DHCP server will be down and people may have difficulty with network access until the server is back up.  Please ensure that any personal machines are protected as well.  The departmental machines should be back up on Monday morning (perhaps even on Sunday).

The following is an informational posting from the portal (Blackboard):

Many users have received emails with a Subject line of “Notice” that claim to be From some address like “Mathematics <adminn@math.toronto.edu>” or “Department of Mathematics <helpdesk1@math.toronto.edu>”.  These emails are attempts to get your passwords and should be ignored.

On Tuesday, February 7 a province-wide voltage reduction test will be carried out which may affect our computer systems.

From 9am to 10am that day there will be a 3% voltage reduction.

From 1pm to 2pm that day there will be a 5% voltage reduction.

All our main servers should be unaffected by these reductions, however computers in offices and BA6200 may shutdown if they are unable to tolerate the reductions (modern equipment should not have any issues).

Symantec’s pcAnywhere software (which runs under Windows, and which is not installed on departmental computers by default) has been compromised and users of that software should disable it until they produce a fix for it.  Please see

http://www.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/pcAnywhere%20Security%20Recommendations%20WP_01_23_Final.pdf

for more information.

The software updates are finished now, except that the mail server will take perhaps 15-30 more minutes.

Due to a problem with someone here at the University (not in our department) downloading too much content from MathSciNet, direct access to http://www.ams.org/mathscinet was requesting a “username and password”
(which we don’t have) for MathSciNet Authentication, when searches were attempted from departmental machines.  If one tried to “Cancel” the connection then messages such as “MathSciNet Access Error” and “MathSciNet is available by subscription only” were displayed.

Work is underway to restore the direct access (in fact things appear to be working again at this moment) but in any case the access through the University’s Library URL:

http://simplelink.library.utoronto.ca/url.cfm/55083

still works as usual.  You may want to bookmark this URL in case the problem recurs over the break.