IT Status (Dept of Mathematics, U of Toronto)
Starting yesterday afternoon there were many phishing emails sent out to departmental members. If you received an email from:
“Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto” helpdesk@math.toronto.edu
with Subject Line:
Your Mailbox Has Exceeded
and the message asks you to click on a link that is in Germany (the hostname part ends in “.de”) then that is a phishing message.
The following is from:
http://www.systemstatus.utoronto.ca/systems/instructors-unable-to-access-course-sites
Due to a problem with the data feed between the HR system and the University’s authentication and authorization database (UTORauth) during the day Tuesday, many instructors have lost access to their course sites in the Portal today.
We are currently rolling back our access lists to Monday’s state and instructors should have their access reinstated in the next 1-2 hours. Normal updates will resume tonight.
Students are not affected, and there are no implications to data outside this one specific area of the system. Some slowdowns may be encountered in other areas of the Portal while the correction is made. Thank you for your patience.
The UofT networking people will be working on the main router in Bahen tomorrow (Thursday, October 27, 2011) morning from 6am until 8am. There will likely be short network outages during that time.
The lw2 printer will be down for about an hour today (from 3:30pm until 4:30pm) to perform maintenance on it. Please use lw3 during that time.
The UofT I+TS Security Group has asked that people be reminded that UofT (and also the Department of Mathematics) will never ask for someone to send a password via email (unless that email is well encrypted, and currently most people still do not use that). They have a warning page for avoiding email and phishing fraud.
Also, the main UTORweblogin page (to access the Portal for Blackboard, for example and UofT’s webmail) has a large box with an anti-phishing warning to remind people to not type passwords into the wrong web pages.
We are planning to install the latest version (R2011a) of matlab on sphere today.
There seem to be some problems with the matlab installer. We are trying to find a workaround, but it is not clear if the update to R2011a will work today.
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
From the Network Operations Centre:
The University of Toronto’s connectivity to the Internet and to GTAnet will be impacted briefly between 07:45 and 08:15 on Wednesday, 10-August-2011 due to a scheduled cutover of the UofT link to GTAnet new router.
Please see the message about the (complete, non-backed-up) removal of the 215 Huron servers and files on 2011aug03.
As mentioned in an earlier post there is a useful University link for information about wireless at: http://wireless.utoronto.ca/using.
As of June 20, 2011 the wireless situation has improved. The bandwidth is better and with a modern wireless card you can use a new SSID which will not require manual reauthentication every time you connect to the wireless network.
The old SSID is UTORwin and its WEP key is UToronto1home (you should avoid using this SSID if at all possible, as it is quite insecure).
The new SSID is UofT (which uses the more secure WPA wireless protocol). You then only have to authenticate once against radius.wireless.utoronto.ca with your UTORid and password. If you have problems you can verify that your UTORid and password are valid. If your UTORid and password are valid and you are still having problems then detailed configuration instructions (for some OSes) are available.
