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.

The webpages inside the CMS (content management system) are all using the UTF-8 character encoding, but other webpages can now change the charset with the appropriate use of the meta tag.  This was the behaviour on the old website and it has been restored to make this simpler for users.

The activity2010-faculty.tex file on coxeter has been slightly updated.  The second line was uncommented and third line was commented out.  This should give a better papersize and orientation automatically for users.  (You can make this change yourself if you have already copied the file from /usr/local/lib and started editing it.)

When trying to print (from within acroread) a pdf file which was generated with:

pdflatex activity2010-faculty.tex

you should not select “Landscape” under “Orientation” since the file will already be in landscape mode and selecting this option will result in bad output.

The new departmental webpages that use nicer mathematical fonts (such as many Events pages) use jsMath (code that translates TeX-like instructions into javascript to display in your browser) in order to create the characters in mathematical fonts.  If you install the extra jsMath fonts (click on the “jsMath” button in the lower right corner of a browser window that uses such fonts and select “Hi-Res Fonts for Printing”) then things will look and print much better.

If you do not wish to install the fonts it would still probably be a good idea to click on the “jsMath” in the lower corner then select “Options” and then select “Use native Unicode characters”.  Special mathematical characters may not be available, but characters such as Greek letters will look much better than with the default “Use images for symbols only” setting (images are difficult to properly position and are often shifted up or down on the line and do not look very good) .

Of course this only works if you have javascript enabled in your browser.

If you click on the About link on the main departmental webpage, http://www.math.toronto.edu/, you will see Computing on the left-hand side menu.  That link will bring you to http://www.math.toronto.edu/cms/computing/, which is the main help page.  There is also a wiki page at http://wiki.math.toronto.edu/TorontoMathWiki/index.php/Computing.  In general if you are looking for help you should try the Search link (accessible on the top right of our main page) .  If you have trouble finding information through there then please let us know and we will try to improve the search function.

Recently (this week) there have been many spam emails sent to departmental addresses.  There is an attached file (called “settings.zip”) that you are asked to run.  Running attachments is very dangerous since viruses are often sent that way.  We do not send out email asking users to run attached files and we do not sign emails with “math.utoronto.ca Technical Support”.  The spammers are getting craftier with their messages, so we all must be careful.

Also be wary of “phishing attacks”.  The University has information at http://www.news.utoronto.ca/campus-news/u-of-t-computer-staff-warn-of-phishing-scams.html about these.  Remember that no UofT person should ever ask anyone to send username/password combinations via email.

lw2 was repaired just before noon today. This time the faulty part was exchanged so it seems more likely that this repair will last longer than the last time.

If you use OWA to access the UTORExchange servers (not many people in our department do this…it is only for accessing university email accounts, not our usual email accounts) then you will notice a colour/logo change after March 2, 2010.  The UofT I+TS people have asked that people be alerted to the following information:

Had we not provided notice, customers accessing http://owa.utoronto.ca after the colors changed should all have been suspicious that this was a phishing attack, and refused to provide their UTORid and password.

Please have all customers examine the new authentication page ahead of time at, http://owa-logo.utoronto.ca

The page at http://owa-logo.utoronto.ca looks like http://owa.utoronto.ca will look after implementation of the new colors.

This includes the browser “lock” coming together to indicate this site is protected by a certificate.

The demonstration page at http://owa-logo.utoronto.ca differs from what will be implemented at http://owa.utoronto.ca in the
following ways,

– the URL in the browser bar will be https://owa-logo.utoronto.ca/…

Customers should always make sure it is https://owa.utoronto.ca/…

– attempts to “Log On” using any UTORid and passwords will always fail.