Information — Page 20

Historical Departmental IT Status Information

These are the old departmental IT status messages that were transferred from the webserver to this blog. They are also available at:

http://www.math.toronto.edu/oldstatus/all.html

where the formatting is better.

Departmental IT Status Information for January 2010

Jan 20, 2010

All the departmental servers are back up.

Jan 20, 2010

The departmental webserver and sphere are back up.

Jan 15, 2010

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, www, and mail will be brought down for hardware/software maintenance at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Jan 15, 2010

The networking in 1 Spadina, rooms 208 and 209, will be brought down by the UofT networking people for hardware upgrades on Tuesday, January 19 around 2:00pm-2:30pm.

Jan 6, 2010

An update at the end of last year has made secure ftp (accessed with either sftp or WinSCP, usually) more sensitive to output during shell startup. So if you use the default tcsh as your shell and you want to be sure that your commands in a .login, .cshrc, or .tcshrc file don’t produce output unless you are at a prompt then use:

if ($?prompt) then
<your_commands_go_here>
endif

[Last update: Jan 20, 2010]

Departmental IT Status Information for December 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Dec 29, 2009

The mail server is working normally again.

Dec 29, 2009

The mail server is currently slow due to a large backlog of mail that is is being processed. IMAP access is currently disabled temporarily as well.

Dec 21, 2009

All systems are back online.

Dec 18, 2009

Reminder: Bahen power outage on Monday, December 21, 2009 from 7am until 5pm

Dec 17, 2009

Adobe’s acroread software has a major Javascript security problem. The suggested JavaScript Blacklist Framework change has been added to coxeter to prevent this vulnerability. However due to continuing Javascript problems it is suggested that users do the following to completely disable Javascript to prevent future problems:

1. Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader. (On coxeter type: acroread)
2. Select Edit>Preferences
3. Select the JavaScript Category
4. Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
5. Click OK

Dec 16, 2009

The departmental server upgrades were completed a little before 4:45pm.

Dec 16, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere will be brought down for software maintenance at 4:15pm today as was previously announced. The web and mail servers will also be temporarily unavailable. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 4:45pm.

Dec 15, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere will be brought down for software maintenance at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 4:45pm.

Dec 9, 2009

The departmental servers were upgraded and they were all back online before 5pm today.

Dec 8, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, www, and mail will be brought down for software maintenance at 4:15pm on Wednesday (December 9) as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Dec 4, 2009

Bahen power outage on Monday, December 21, 2009 from 7am until 5pm

The University has scheduled a complete power outage from 7am until 5pm for Bahen (and Koffler, Architecture, and Fields) for some electrical work, on Monday, December 21, 2009. No entry to Bahen will be permitted during those hours. All the main departmental servers and user machines will need to be shut down before this time. Machines will be shut down between about 6am and 7am on that morning. Please ensure that you have logged out of your personal machines and all the departmental machines before 6am. There will be no access to coxeter or the mail server or the web server during the outage. There is a small chance that the day or time for the outage will change; please see this webpage for any updates before December 18 (this webpage will not be accessible when the power is out).
[Last update: Dec 29, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for November 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Nov 24, 2009

Some phishing email has been sent with a From: University of Toronto. <email@info.com> line, asking for your login information, including password. The Department (and the University and anyone else) should never ask for passwords to be sent via unencrypted email (and even then only when prearranged). Our spam filter has flagged that email as SPAM, so that helps too.

Nov 20, 2009

The departmental servers www and mail were temporarily unavailable during the early hours due to a power outage/spike problem which caused a network switch to partially fail. Connectivity was restored around 8:30am.

Nov 12, 2009

Further to the note of November 10, if you want text files to be presented with ISO-8859-1 encoding then you can append .iso88591 to a file ending with .txt (so file.txt.iso88591 would be used if your text file is encoded as ISO-8859-1).

Nov 10, 2009

Due to the way the new web server (www) serves pages, if you want to use ISO-8859-1 encoding for characters on an HTML page then you will have to append .iso88591 to your filename (so file.html.iso88591 would be used if your html is encoded as ISO-8859-1, as opposed to the default UTF-8 encoding). The meta tag no longer works inside web pages to set the encoding.

Nov 4, 2009

The departmental servers sphere, www, and mail are back online. coxeter will undergo a final reboot and it should be back up by 5:00pm.

Nov 4, 2009

A new update was released today that will require that we reboot coxeter, sphere, and mail. So those machines will be going offline at 4:15pm. We expect that they will be back by 5pm.

Nov 2, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, www, and mail will have software updates installed at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled. Rebooting may not be necessary but certain programs such as firefox and kpdf will have to be restarted (if you leave them running they will not work properly after the upgrade). We expect that the updates will be finished by 5:00pm.
[Last update: Nov 24, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for October 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Oct 29, 2009

Since it was taking a long time to get the tcsh bug fixed we have gone back to the previous version of tcsh which has been working fine for us.

Oct 28, 2009

The departmental web server, www, has now had its software and hardware upgraded in preparation for the changeover to a new CMS-based departmental website. If you discover problems please send email to requests@math.toronto.edu.

Oct 27, 2009

The departmental web server, www, will be brought down briefly for a software and hardware upgrade tomorrow at about 11:00am. We will be moving to a faster, more eco-friendly server that will be able to support the new departmental website with content management. The new server software is more modern and as previously stated the only likely noticeable change is that the default is to use UTF-8 encoding instead of ISO-8859-1 encoding for characters. This will not affect you if your webpages use only the usual ASCII character set. You can explicitly set the charset encoding to the old encoding for a webpage if you desire by adding:

to the head section of your webpages.

Oct 17, 2009

There seems to be a bug with the shell, tcsh, when combining quoted strings with the shell wildcard character (*) in some circumstances since the upgrade last Wednesday. This problem has been reported. A different shell (such as bash or zsh) could be used temporarily to avoid this problem (just type the shell name at the coxeter prompt to use a new shell).

Oct 14, 2009

The server updates went relatively quickly. coxeter and sphere were not rebooted and mail was unavailable for about a half-hour.

Oct 14, 2009

A new acroread upgrade arrived this morning so we will be adding that to this afternoon’s updates. Users running acroread will have to restart those processes.

Oct 14, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere will be updated today, but we do not expect to have to reboot them. Java will be updated so if you use that then it may change after about 4:30pm…those who use java inside their browser (firefox) on coxeter will have to restart their browser. The mail server will go offline for software maintenance at about 4:15pm, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that it will be back up before 5:00pm.

Oct 8, 2009

The University will upgrade our network connection in the Earth Sciences Building to the UofT backbone today (October 8) sometime between 9am and noon. They expect that our network connection to sites outside of the department will be interrupted for at most 15 minutes.

Oct 7, 2009

The mail quotas on the mailserver have all been increased by 50MB.

Oct 7, 2009

The departmental servers are back online. sphere and mail were back at 5pm and coxeter was back very shortly thereafter.

Oct 7, 2009

The quota reporting system on coxeter has not been working properly since yesterday. The mail server was temporarily out of service yesterday before noon. We expect that things should be back to normal after this afternoon’s maintenance.

Oct 6, 2009

The University networking upgrade was completed without problems this morning. The server maintenance is still scheduled for tomorrow at 4:15pm, as usual.

Oct 2, 2009

The mail server changeover to maildir went fairly well. There are only a few minor quirks to iron out. As always, you can check the maildir upgrade information page for more information.

Oct 2, 2009

The University will upgrade our departmental network connection (in Bahen) to the UofT backbone on Tuesday (October 6) at approximately 8:45am. They expect that our network connection to sites outside of the department will be interrupted for at most 15 minutes.

Oct 2, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be brought down for hardware/software maintenance at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.
[Last update: Oct 29, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for September 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Sep 30, 2009

The mail server was brought up at 1:30pm and seems to be working fine.

Sep 30, 2009

Things are taking a little longer than anticipated, 1:30pm is the current estimated completion time.

Sep 30, 2009

The mail server is now being converted to the new maildir format. We expect things to be back up at about 1pm as originally planned.

Sep 30, 2009

The departmental mail server is now offline for the maildir upgrade.

Sep 30, 2009

The /mail partition on coxeter has been unmounted in preparation for the update in about a half-hour.

Sep 24, 2009

The upgrade of the departmental mail server, mail, is currently scheduled to start next Wednesday (Sep 30) at 11am. The switchover should be done by 1pm (perhaps even by noon). There is a possibility that coxeter will have to be rebooted during this time, but we will try to avoid that. The earlier than usual upgrade schedule was chosen to give people time to ask questions during the day after this change. There is more information at the maildir upgrade information page.

Sep 22, 2009

The upgrade of the departmental mail server, mail, is being moved to Wednesday (Sep 30) of next week to give some people a little more time to prepare for the change and to automatically handle more changeovers. In particular, the old methods of filtering spam email and whitelisting and blacklisting of email addresses will be replaced by newer ones, now that the PureMessage filtering has proven to be quite reliable.

Sep 16, 2009

coxeter and sphere were back up before 6pm and seem to be functioning normally again.

Sep 16, 2009

The mail server was back online at about 5:15pm. coxeter is still updating but seems on track to be finished before 6pm.

Sep 16, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are currently unavailable for software updates. It seems that this large update will take somewhat longer than usual. Currently we estimate that the servers will be back by 6pm.

Sep 14, 2009

The departmental mail server, mail, will soon (next Wednesday is the currently scheduled date) be upgraded to the more backup-efficient maildir format. This new format does not allow dots (.) to be used in folder names. Users who have such mail folders will then see that a folder such as my.news will become a folder my with a subfolder news which will contain the messages. We will be increasing the email quota by 50MB initially after this change and expect to add more soon.

Sep 14, 2009

Sep 8, 2009

The departmental web server, www, will soon be moved to a new, faster server in preparation for some major changes. We will be updating the web server software to a much newer version, but the only likely noticeable change is that the default is to use UTF-8 encoding instead of ISO-8859-1 encoding for characters. This will not affect you if your webpages use only the usual ASCII character set. You can explicitly set the charset encoding to the old encoding for a webpage if you desire by adding:

to the head section of your webpages.

[Last update: Sep 30, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for August 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Aug 26, 2009

mail had somewhat less downtime than expected and seems to be working fine now.

Aug 26, 2009

mail will be temporarily unavailable (for about a half hour) while we do the last hardware adjustments.

Aug 26, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are back up but mail may have to be rebooted since it still has a hardware difficulty. The new estimate is that things will be completed by 7pm.

Aug 26, 2009

The system updating is taking somewhat longer than expected. The current estimate is that the servers will be back at 6pm.

Aug 25, 2009

Quota reporting on coxeter and mail has been temporarily turned off due to a hardware problem. We hope to have this fixed by tomorrow.

Aug 25, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm tomorrow (Wednesday), as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Aug 22, 2009

At approximately 03:21 on Saturday August 22 the mail server crashed, possibly due to disk problems (although the cause is still under investigation). It is not believed that any email was lost. The server came back on-line at 11:01.

Aug 13, 2009

The latest version of Mathematica (7.0.1) has been installed on sphere. Please see the Mathematica home page for more details about this version.

Aug 13, 2009

The graduate student room, room 936 in 215 Huron was functional as of yesterday. It seems that the printer (which is now called lwh2) needs a new toner cartridge and one should be brought over there either tomorrow or next week.

Aug 13, 2009

The networking in Sid Smith 622 was fixed two days ago.

Aug 10, 2009

The network in Sid Smith 622 is currently experiencing problems. We have reported the problem and it sounds like things will be fixed by tomorrow.

Aug 5, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail were updated and appear to be functioning normally again.

Aug 5, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are now being updated. We expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Aug 5, 2009

The graduate student room, SF4303F, is going to be vacated on Monday (August 10). Most of the carrels/chairs will move to room 936 in 215 Huron. The computers in SF4303F will likely be shut down on Friday to prepare for the electricians on Monday morning. The plan is for the computers to be reconnected in room 936 in 215 Huron by the end of Wednesday.

Aug 4, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be brought down for software maintenance at 4:15pm this Wednesday (August 5) as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Aug 4, 2009

The University’s internet connectivity will be disrupted for one or more brief periods of time on Saturday, August 8th, between 3am and 7am. Total downtime should be less than 20 minutes.
[Last update: Aug 26, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for July 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Jul 22, 2009

firefox on coxeter has been updated to a newer version, 3.0.12. There were only four users who were running the older version and they have been sent email suggesting that they quit that older session of firefox.

Jul 22, 2009

firefox on coxeter will be updated today at 4:15pm to a newer version, 3.0.12. Those users who are running firefox at that time will have to quit and restart.

Jul 8, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail were updated and appear to be functioning normally again.

Jul 8, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are currently being upgraded. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up by 5:00pm.

Jul 8, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm today, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up by 5:00pm.

Jul 7, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm on Wednesday (tomorrow, July 8), as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.
[Last update: Jul 22, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for June 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Jun 22, 2009

The departmental spamfiltering software will now no longer send outgoing email if it detects that the email contains a virus. If you try to send a message containing a virus to person@business.com, for example, you will get a message bounced back similar to the following:

From: MAILER-DAEMON@math.toronto.edu (Mail Delivery System)
Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

This is the mail system at host mail.math.toronto.edu.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

<person@business.com>: host 127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1] said: 550 One or more
viruses (Troj/Agent-KGL) were detected in the message. (in reply to end of
DATA command)

Jun 18, 2009

The departmental spamfiltering software now flags viruses known to it as 100% likely to be spam and prepends [VIRUS DETECTED] to the Subject line. Email that is flagged as 99% or 100% likely to be spam is normally autodeleted but users can decide to receive all such emails by running

spamfiltering autodelete off

Doing this will usually increase the size of your SuspectedSpam folder by about a factor of 10.

Jun 17, 2009

The departmental servers are all back online as of 4:50pm.

Jun 17, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are currently down for software upgrades. It seems that mail will be back by 4:45pm and coxeter and sphere should be back by 5:00pm.

Jun 16, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4:15pm, as is normally scheduled. If there are no problems we expect that they will be back up around 5:00pm.

Jun 9, 2009

You can register for a free seminar, “Speeding Up MATLAB Applications,” to be held at Ryerson University in the morning of Thursday, June 11. For more information please see Matlab Seminar.
[Last update: Jun 22, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for May 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

May 22, 2009

The UTORdial Service (modem access to UofT) will be terminated effective September 1, 2009. Please see here for more information.

Please note that the department stopped supporting modem access quite some time ago.

May 19, 2009

Some email messages claiming to be from facebook.com seem to have gotten passed our spam filter recently. If you get too many emails from any one particular address you can always blacklist that address by running, on coxeter
maillistedit add blacklist notification@facebook.com

replacing notification@facebook.com with the actual troublesome email address. (Of course legitimate email from that address will also no longer get through.)
maillistedit help

gives more information about whitelisting and blacklisting email addresses.

May 13, 2009

If you would like to have a printer selection dialog box come up when you try to print from firefox then you need to edit the prefs.js file that firefox uses. This file is normally called

/home/your_account_name/.mozilla/firefox/random_8_character_string.default/prefs.js

You would then delete the following three lines

user_pref(“print.always_print_silent”, true);
user_pref(“print.postscript.cups.enabled”, false);
user_pref(“print.printer_PostScript/default.print_command”, “kprinter”);

which were added at one time due to problems with the Red Hat print subsystem.

[Last update: May 22, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for April 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Apr 29, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are back up.

Apr 29, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm today, as is normally scheduled.

Apr 28, 2009

The lw2 printer is working once again.

Apr 24, 2009

The fuser on the lw2 printer has been damaged and that printer is no longer working. It will (silently) reject all jobs. Please use lw3 for now. We expect that it will take until early next week to get a new fuser.

Apr 21, 2009

The default behaviours of xdvi and dvips were changed slightly to use letter as opposed to a4 papersize.

Apr 16, 2009

After the update to the spam-filtering software at the beginning of this month some emails with “suspicious” attachments were being held by the software. It was discovered that this feature was being overzealous and we have forwarded all the held emails (only about 30 messages in two weeks). We have reconfigured the software to no longer hold such emails. Please let us know if any bad attachments get through. The software does not deliver any email when it finds a known virus.

Apr 13, 2009

A new printer (the same model as in the mail room) was installed in BA6200 last week and it seems to be functioning well. That printer is still called lw3 as before, so commands to print to it are unchanged.

Apr 1, 2009

The departmental servers sphere and mail are functioning again. coxeter should be back by about 5:10pm.
[Last update: Apr 28, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for March 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Mar 31, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm on Wednesday (April 1), as is normally scheduled.

Mar 11, 2009

The mail server upgrade went a little more quickly than the revised estimate and now all our servers seem to be functioning normally again.

Mar 11, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere have almost been completely upgraded but we are waiting for the slower mail server to finish its updates. We expect that everything should be available by 6pm.

Mar 11, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail are now unavailable while software updates are being installed.

Mar 9, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm on Wednesday (March 11), as is normally scheduled.
[Last update: Mar 31, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for February 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Feb 9, 2009

The new fuser for the lw3 printer arrived today and lw3 seems to be working now. If you notice that the printer’s cover still has the “closing problem” please send an email to requests@math.toronto.edu.

Feb 6, 2009

We have ordered a new fuser for the lw3 printer which should arrive next week. The printer’s cover was serviced earlier today but there may still be issues with that since testing cannot proceed until the fuser is replaced.

Feb 4, 2009

The upgrades were successful.

Feb 4, 2009

Currently we are estimating that coxeter will be back up by 6pm. mail is up now.

Feb 4, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere are being upgraded. It will likely be somewhat later than 5pm when they have finished this large upgrade.

Feb 2, 2009

On Thursday, February 4, between 7:45am and 8:00am a University network core router will be down for software maintenance. Connection to the Exchange Network, UTORdial Network, and the satellite campuses will be interrupted.
[Last update: Feb 9, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for January 2009

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Jan 30, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be going down on Wednesday (February 4) at 4:15pm for software maintenance, as is normally scheduled. We expect that the servers will be back up at 5pm if there are no unexpected difficulties.

Jan 27, 2009

The UofT Oracle calendaring system will be replaced by a Microsoft Exchange server at the end of February. If you are a faculty or staff member who has a UofT Oracle calendaring account and if you wish to continue using the UofT calendaring system you will have to move your UofT email from UTORmail to the Microsoft Exchange server, UTORexchange (this does not affect your email that we store here in the Department). You can do this by following the instructions at http://www.exchange.utoronto.ca/.

After migrating from UTORmail you will only be able to use UTORexchange for your email from then on. Calendaring is only available to those using UTORexchange and all old calendars will be migrated over at the end of February.

Although there is some IMAP support, so that Thunderbird could work for accessing email, it cannot deal with calendaring. There is web access to UTORexchange at http://owa.utoronto.ca/. This web access depends on the browser used. Connecting to the calendar or email with any browser (such as Firefox or Safari) other than Internet Explorer 7 will give reduced functionality.

Jan 27, 2009

The departmental mail server has been upgraded.

Jan 27, 2009

The departmental mail reading service will be briefly interrupted today for software upgrades. The total outage should be less than 5 minutes.

Jan 14, 2009

Now that we have larger backup disks it was possible to make a small quota upgrade. There was a 50MB increase on both coxeter for user files and on mail for your mail files.

Jan 14, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail were upgraded without problem.

Jan 14, 2009

Reminder: the departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be going down today (Wednesday) at 4:15pm for software maintenance, as is normally scheduled. We expect that the servers will be back up at 5pm if there are no unexpected difficulties.

Jan 8, 2009

The printer in SS622 seems to be working properly again.

Jan 7, 2009

The networking in SS622 seems to be working properly now. The printer still needs to be reconfigured to work on that foreign network but that should be done soon.

Jan 7, 2009

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be going down next Wednesday (January 14) at 4:15pm for software maintenance, as is normally scheduled. We expect that the servers will be back up at 5pm if there are no unexpected difficulties.

Jan 7, 2009

We are still investigating the network problems in SS622 that resulted from the removal of our network connection in late December. There appears to be some hardware problem which we are tracking down.
[Last update: Jan 30, 2009]
Departmental IT Status Information for December 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Dec 22, 2008

The departmental network connectivity in Bahen was restored this afternoon at approximately 2pm. The departmental networking gear was fine but there was a problem with a fibre patch cable in one of the Computing and Network Services rooms. We were fortunate that someone from CNS was willing to come in early or else this problem would have lasted until January 5.

Dec 21, 2008

The departmental network connectivity in Bahen has been disrupted since the early afternoon yesterday. It appears that the departmental networking gear is functioning properly but the connection to the University’s backbone network is no longer working. The University’s networking people have known about the problem since it started and we have been in contact with them since last night but since the University is closed there may not be anyone available to deal with this problem until it reopens.

Dec 19, 2008

The network connectivity in SS622 has been disrupted since the switches we were connected to were removed when Economics moved out of Sidney Smith Hall. A connection has been made to a new network but there appear to be hardware issues and the connection is not reliable so the machines in that room will likely not be functioning until classes resume in January.

Dec 15, 2008

The University’s internet connectivity will be disrupted for periods of time on Thursday, December 18th, between 04:00 and 07:00 due to scheduled maintenance work.

Dec 10, 2008

The University’s internet connectivity is currently (2pm) being disrupted due to problems experienced by our ISP. Engineers are currently investigating. There is no ETA for the fix at this time.

Dec 9, 2008

Remember that if you getting email from one particular email address that you do not wish to receive then you can blacklist that address by running, on coxeter
maillistedit add blacklist spammer@faked.com

replacing spammer@faked.com with the actual troublesome email address.
maillistedit help

gives more information about whitelisting and blacklisting email addresses.
[Last update: Dec 22, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for November 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Nov 26, 2008

Because firefox has started creating a very large file to warn users about phishing and malware sites, the quotas for users have been increased by 50MB to accomodate this. We are planning to increase the quotas by another 50MB in the next couple of weeks when we see that the new, more efficient, backup system is running well.

Nov 19, 2008

The upgrades of coxeter, sphere, and mail were successful.

Nov 18, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm tomorrow (Wednesday), as is normally scheduled.

Nov 11, 2008

The plugins for webmail were reinstalled yesterday. Please note that if you wish to use the “Check Spelling” option then you will have to have Javascript enabled.
[Last update: Nov 26, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for October 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Oct 30, 2008

The quotas on the departmental mail server, mail, were not automatically enabled last night, but they have been enabled again.

Oct 29, 2008

The departmental mail server, mail, is currently back online. It has the latest version of the OS and working (software) RAID’ed disks.

Oct 29, 2008

The departmental mail server, mail, is currently offline. Things are taking somewhat more time than expected but we expect that they are very close to working. Another half hour should do it.

Oct 29, 2008

The departmental mail server, mail, is currently offline. Things are taking somewhat more time than expected but we expect things to be back before 6pm.

Oct 29, 2008

The departmental mail server, mail, will be taken offline for hardware and software maintanence today at 4:15pm. It is expected that it will be back online by 5pm.

Oct 22, 2008

The departmental mail server, mail, will be taken offline for maintanence next Wednesday at 4:15pm. It is expected that it will be back online by 5pm. At the momemt it appears that coxeter and sphere will not need to be taken offline on that day.

Oct 22, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail were taken offline for maintanence at 4:15pm, as is normally scheduled. They were back online at 5pm.

Oct 10, 2008

The Kile TeX/LaTeX editor has been installed on coxeter. It provides a graphical user-friendly way to edit, compile, and view TeX/LaTeX documents. Please run kile on coxeter if you wish to try it out.

Oct 1, 2008

firefox has been changed to use a new default version that should support Flash on coxeter (without sound though, since currently the X protocol provides no facilities for handling audio). firefox was a little unstable early this afternoon but should be okay now.
[Last update: Oct 30, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for September 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Sep 24, 2008

coxeter now has the latest version of Firefox (version 3.0.1).

Sep 24, 2008

The latest version of TeXLive (TeXLive2008) has been installed on coxeter although it is NOT SUPPORTED due to its rapidly changing nature. That means that you should not use it for anything crucial or important.

If you wish to use it please contact Victor Ivrii as he is the local TeXLive expert.
[Last update: Sep 24, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for August 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Aug 28, 2008

The Licensed Software Office (LSO) at UofT occasionally gets requests to carry a dedicated graphing package. The most frequently requested package is Origin Lab’s OriginPro (currently at version 8) which runs under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or later, Windows 2000, Windows XP or later, and Vista.

If there is enough interest to get a site license the LSO feels they may be able to get an 80-90% decrease off the educational price (currently about US$700). If you are interested in this product please send an email to requests@math.toronto.edu so that we can let the LSO know how many copies our department would be willing to purchase.

Aug 16, 2008

(The following is based on an email from the UofT mail server people).

Various people throughout the internet have reported getting an email message with the subject “Our web address www.utoronto.ca will be switched off”. The message content asks that they update their local web site to change links for www.utoronto.ca to http://www.utoronto-ca.com

http://www.utoronto-ca.com is a bogus page that looks like the University of Toronto home page. (It’s done using frames. So the links all work, giving the real equivalent page. But the URL in the address field remains the bogus one.) The IP address is not on a UofT network. The DNS name was registered a few days ago.

The bogus home page, and the effort to link it in to various sites around the internet, could be an attempt to mount a man-in-the-middle Phishing attack.

The UofT mail server people are currently pursuing closing down the bogus web site.

Aug 13, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm today, as is normally scheduled.
[Last update: Aug 28, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for July 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Jul 30, 2008

The new version (8.1.2) of acroread is now the default on coxeter. It is able to display NSERC pdf forms and printing from within it is working now.

Jul 29, 2008

There is a new version (8.1.2) of acroread available by running /usr/bin/acroread on coxeter. It will be made the default version later this week.

Jul 25, 2008

The mailgroup command will be updated (most likely) next week to add a message header with the name of the file of addresses used when no To: line is explicitly specified (that is, To: Unnamed Mailing List is used) in the command.

Jul 23, 2008

The UofT network connectivity to the outside world will be disrupted on Thursday, July 24, 2008, between 7:30am and 8:00am due to scheduled maintenance.

Jul 14, 2008

On Wednesday there will be a short (5-10 minutes) network outage sometime between 8am and 4pm in Earth Sciences while CNS upgrades the router there.

There continue to be more reports of phishing scams being made to try to get UTORids and passwords. Please see the article in the UofT News for more information.

Jul 2, 2008

Authenticated outgoing (SMTP) access for email is now available at smtp.math.utoronto.ca on port 587. You have to use TLS as your secure connection to use this service.

If you use this outgoing email service then when you send out email it will come from the departmental server. This can be more convenient if you travel with a laptop since you do not need to change your outgoing email server each time you move around.
[Last update: Jul 30, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for June 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Jun 18, 2008

The server updates have been completed.

The servers are now being updated.

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be upgraded this afternoon around 4:15pm.

Jun 16, 2008

There have been reports that some email from yorku.ca and gc.ca has been put into the SuspectedSpam folder by our Puremessage spam filter. Please check your SuspectedSpam folder to ensure that no real mail was incorrectly sent there.

The problem is being investigated.

Jun 13, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be unavailable during maintenance starting at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled.

Jun 5, 2008

The University network connection to the internet will be interrupted on Saturday morning between 3am-4am. The outage is expected to last less than 30 minutes but things may take longer than planned.

Jun 4, 2008

The X terminals are working again. A configuration file had gotten overwritten during the upgrade.

Jun 4, 2008

coxeter was back online at 5:30pm. A few final checks are being made, but it seems to be working properly other than the X terminals.

Jun 4, 2008

coxeter is now in the software installation cleanup stage but will take until about 5:30pm until it is ready.

Jun 4, 2008

coxeter is currently being upgraded and it will likely take at least until 5:15pm until it is ready.

Jun 4, 2008

coxeter will be going down at 4:15pm today for software upgrading. mail and www should function as usual, but sphere will not have its home directories since it gets those from coxeter.

Jun 2, 2008

The pdftk program for manipulating pdf files has been installed on coxeter. Use pdftk –help for more information. The combinepdf script which has been on coxeter since last year is simpler if you just wish to concatenate two (or more) pdf files into one large one.

Jun 2, 2008

The main departmental server, coxeter, will be rebooted (to upgrade it to RHEL 5.2) at 4:15pm on Wednesday, as is normally scheduled. It is expected that it will be back up around 5:00pm if there are no problems (this is a much larger update than usual, so it may take somewhat longer to install).

Jun 2, 2008

The updated spam expiration script has been tested and all accounts that are set up for autoexpiration should be working properly as of this evening.
[Last update: Jun 18, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information for May 2008

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

May 28, 2008

The reboots of coxeter, sphere, and mail this afternoon were successful.

May 26, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted this Wednesday as usual, except that sphere will be rebooted at 3:15pm in order to test out the latest large Red Hat update to RHEL 5.2 before we upgrade coxeter and mail at 4:15pm.

May 20, 2008

There will be a brief (approximately 5 minute) network outage tomorrow morning between 8am and 9am for a UofT networking change. Access to the internet outside of Bahen will not work during this time.

The new lw2 printer was installed early this afternoon and has already printed almost 150 pages for people.

May 14, 2008

The reboots of coxeter, sphere, and mail appear to have completed successfully.

The reboots of coxeter, sphere, and mail are still planned for 4:15pm today.

May 13, 2008

A new printer has been ordered to replace lw2.

The autoexpire feature of our spam filtering system is now running for most people (some email files are in a non-standard format which we are not expiring). We expect to start the automatic expiration tomorrow.

May 12, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted for OS patching at 4:15pm Wednesday as is normally scheduled. If there are no unforeseen problems, we expect that the servers will be back online by 5pm.

May 8, 2008

The autodelete feature of our spam filtering system has been turned on now, so any email flagged at 99% or 100% probability of being spam will be discarded (deleted) automatically. This should result in substantially less email being sent to SuspectedSpam folders.

The autoexpire feature of our spam filtering system has been turned on now as well, but the expiration of older emails in the SuspectedSpam folder won’t start until May 13. The first run of the expiration will most likely be run during the day so it can be monitored, but normally the expiration will be run very late in the evening or very early in the morning.

You can manipulate autoexpire as described below if you so desire.

May 7, 2008

Starting tomorrow all incoming email that is flagged as 99% or 100% as being spam will be automatically discarded (deleted). If you would rather have this email sent to your SuspectedSpam folder please type the following on coxeter:

spamfiltering autodelete off

after May 8, 2008.

Also as of May 13, 2008 each night we will autoexpire (delete) all messages in SuspectedSpam folders which are more than 7 days old.

You can change the number of days of emails that are saved during the autoexpire run with, for example if you want 30 days saved, by running on coxeter:

spamfiltering autoexpire on 30

or you can turn this feature off with:

spamfiltering autoexpire off

if you run these commands after May 8, 2008.

Of course if you turn off the autodelete or autoexpire features then more of your email quota will be used by the SuspectedSpam file. Increasing the autoexpire limit to 30 will probably not use very much quota if that is more convenient for you (you can always run quota on coxeter to see how much space you are using).

May 2, 2008

Reminder: the spamfiltering command has been extended. It can now be used to automatically (permanently, without backup) delete any incoming email that is flagged as 99% or 100% likely to be spam by the departmental puremessage filter. If you would like to use this please type the following on coxeter:

spamfiltering autodelete on

(Of course you can turn this off with off instead of on.)

Only use this command if you are confident that the puremessage filter is correctly identifying spam for you. Email flagged as 99% likely to be spam has [SPAM:#####] prepended to the Subject line (ask if you want to find out how to determine the exact probability level for your messages). This will result in a much smaller SuspectedSpam file in many cases as typically over 90% of the spam messages in SuspectedSpam files are flagged at 99%.

May 2, 2008

There are more reports of phishing scams being made to try to get UTORids and passwords. Please see the article in the UofT News for more information.
[Last update: May 28, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

Apr 10, 2008

The spamfiltering command has been extended. It can now be used to automatically (permanently, without backup) delete any incoming email that is flagged as 99% or 100% likely to be spam by the departmental puremessage filter. If you would like to use this please type the following on coxeter:

spamfiltering autodelete on

(Of course you can turn this off with off instead of on.)

Apr 8, 2008

Please note that there is a “phishing” scam going on for UTORids regarding a UofT “portal system” upgrade. If you receive an email asking for your UTORid and password, do NOT send that information via email. The portal team would never request that you send them your utorid and password via email.

Apr 8, 2008

The power brownout/outage that affected a large part of UofT on the weekend did not affect our departmental servers since the UPSes were able to handle the load.

Apr 8, 2008

The command djview is now available on coxeter for viewing djvu files.
[Last update: Apr 10, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information

Older status page information has been moved to oldstatus so that this page could be made easier to read and more up-to-date. New information will continue to be added near the top of this page.

March 26, 2008

All systems are working normally after the reboot.

March 26, 2008

mail and www are working again. coxeter will take about another 10 minutes to configure the new printing system.

March 25, 2008

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, www, and mail will be rebooted at 4:15pm tomorrow (Wednesday) as is normally scheduled. Some changes will be made to configurations and UPS connections. We expect that the servers will be back online by 5pm.

March 21, 2008

Printing is working again.

March 21, 2008

There was an unscheduled power outage in Bahen on Thursday evening that lasted until early Friday morning. There may have been a second outage early this morning or some other problem at that time. Currently the departmental servers coxeter, sphere, mail, and www are back online. Printing problems are currently being investigated.

March 19, 2008

The reboots of coxeter, sphere, and mail appear to have taken place without incident.

March 19, 2008

Reminder: coxeter, sphere, and mail will be rebooted today at approximately 4:15pm. We expect that the machines should be back online before 5pm. The web server, www, should not be affected.

March 18, 2008

Due to a broken peering agreement between Cogent (UofT’s non-research network provider) and Telia some European (mostly northern) websites are currently unreachable from UofT.

March 14, 2008

In order to apply security updates coxeter will be rebooted on Wednesday at 4:15pm.

March 10, 2008

If you use Bell Sympatico at home you may be experiencing some problems. There are network troubles affecting large areas of Toronto. You can check http://service.sympatico.ca/index.cfm?method=home.serviceStatus for more (currently not very detailed) information.
[Last update: March 26, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information — February 2008

February 10, 2008

VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Remote login access to coxeter and sphere via ssh has been disabled due to a security issue with Red Hat kernels. We expect that Red Hat should have this fixed by Monday.

Email access via our mail server with pine or thunderbird (or any other IMAPS client) should not be affected. Please send email to requests@math.toronto.edu if you have problems.

coxeter (and sphere) will have to be rebooted when the security fix is applied.

February 11, 2008

Access to coxeter/sphere from the machines in the public terminal room (BA6200) is still possible.

Email access is working again while we wait for Red Hat’s updates for the security problems. A patch is currently being tested by Red Hat but they have not given an estimated availability time. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to have this problem solved later today.

As of 8:30pm on Monday the patch from Red Hat has still not appeared and there has still been no announcement about when it should be expected. We will continue to monitor this and if things are not better by Tuesday morning then please send email to requests@math.toronto.edu if you need to access coxeter from your departmental office. We will check individual cases and if machines are secure then we can arrange for access to coxeter. Unfortunately we cannot test home machines so access from them can not be arranged.

Please remember that it will take some time for the patching, rebooting, and testing even after the patch arrives. Thank you for your patience.

February 12, 2008

As of 8:30am on Tuesday the patch has still not arrived. Allowing access to coxeter from outside the department is still not possible so we will be checking individual departmental machines to determine if they are safe and if so will give them access to coxeter. If your need is urgent please send an email to requests@math.toronto.edu so we can try to enable your access more quickly.

Red Hat says, concerning the patch: We expect this to be completed shortly (pending successful completion of testing). So we are expecting the patch to be here this morning.

Since the mail server is still available you can access it with any IMAPS client or webmail even if you cannot access coxeter.

February 12, 2008

The Red Hat patch has been installed and normal ssh service has resumed. Please send an email to requests@math.toronto.edu if you notice anything amiss. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience this security lockdown has caused, we will investigate ways to minimize the impact future events of this kind might cause.

February 19, 2008

The email system will be unavailable for approximately two 10 minute periods today for system maintenance.

The email system maintenance was successfully completed.
[Last update: February 19, 2008]
Departmental IT Status Information — January 2008

January 3, 2008

9:55am: The departmental servers are still scheduled to be brought down at 11:00am.

11:25am: The mail service has been brought down on coxeter and all user processes will be terminated in about one minute.

7:33pm: There were some problems upgrading the new spam filtering system, but those have been resolved. Upgrading the rest of the email system and coxeter will likely not be finished until late on Friday.

11:20pm: Server switchover is proceeding. Completion is still expected to be sometime late on Friday.

January 4, 2008

11:55am: The final testing of the email server is underway.

2:40pm: More testing of email server.

11:20pm: Final testing of backups.

January 5, 2008

Some information about the upgrade

1) The new coxeter and email server are now online. There will certainly be some issues remaining in this major changeover, please be patient and send any problem reports to requests@math.toronto.edu. On Sunday we will continue to address any major problems. Currently password changing is disabled and sphere is not quite ready.

2) Since we are using a new spam filter it is set at the “low” aggressiveness setting so that some suspected spam is sent to your “SuspectedSpam” folder. You can change the aggressiveness by typing “spamfiltering medium” or “spamfiltering high” on coxeter. Type “spamfiltering help” for help.

3) You can access your email as described in the original email sent about this upgrade. If you try the webmail method to access your email then you will have to enable cookies in your browser. Our email security certificate is “self-signed” and it is okay to accept it. Note that the first time you access the email server it will be slow if you have a large mail file.

4) Mail files including your INBOX, mbox, and those in ~/mail and ~/Mail were automatically moved to the email server. Any non-mail files in those directories were moved to a new directory called ~/old-mail on coxeter. Similarly some potentially obsolete configuration files (starting with a period) were relocated to a new directory called ~/.old-dotfiles.

More information about the upgrade

1) If you use “pine” you will have to enter your password whenever you connect since “pine” does not have any built-in way to store passwords safely. Newer email clients, such as “thunderbird” (or using “firefox” to access webmail) can remember passwords.

2) The requests@math.toronto.edu alias is working again, although some other email aliases used in the past still need to be set up.

3) Sending outgoing email from Thunderbird does not seem to be working although it does work for reading email. This is under investigation. Reading/sending from the webmail interface seems to be working fine.

4) Please remember that all email receiving/sending should only be done on the new mail server, mail.math.toronto.edu, and not directly on/to coxeter, which is no longer the mail server. (Actually the outgoing mail server is smtp.math.toronto.edu, but currently that is the same machine as mail.math.toronto.edu.)

January 6, 2008

Upgrade News continued

1) There was a small configuration problem with pine and it was incorrectly keeping email on coxeter (instead of sending it to mail), which has been fixed.

2) The new puremessage spam filtering system seems to be working well, even with the “low” aggressiveness setting that was given to everyone. You can manipulate various email related functions with the coxeter commands:
spamfiltering    for setting the spam filtering aggressiveness level
maillistedit    for adding email addresses to your whitelist and blacklist
forwardedit    for changing email forwarding
vacationmessage    for sending vacation messages when you are away

Type any of the above commands followed by show to see your current status, or followed by help for more information. Note that email forwarding and sending the vacation message happens after spam filtering so less spam should be sent from our system to remote addresses now (this has caused problems in the past).

Upgrade News continued (more)

1) A few email folders were not migrated to the email server during the upgrade but they have been tracked down and will be moved shortly. If you were affected by this you will receive email about what name these folders were given on the new IMAPS server.

2) sphere is now accessible. We are looking into allowing password-less access from coxeter to sphere but that will likely not have priority for some time. The files in your home directory on sphere are the same ones that are on coxeter.

3) Sending outgoing email from Thunderbird is working if things are configured as described in the appropriate URL from original message about the server changeover. Remember that you can only use our SMTP server for outgoing email if you are in the department; at home you have to use your ISP’s outgoing email server.

January 7, 2008

Upgrade News

1) We are working on a way to make pine automatically accept the certificate from the mail server. Having to type in your password every time that you use pine is a property of pine.

2) Currently printing of PDF files is only working when you are logged into coxeter on an X terminal. Apparently Adobe (the makers of acroread) broke this but it is supposedly fixed in the latest release. We are working on getting this.

The main departmental server, coxeter, is scheduled to be switched over to new, more powerful, servers on January 3 and 4, 2007. The main server will still be called coxeter. The compute server will be sphere and the mail server, which uses encrypted IMAP, will be mail for reading email (via email clients or a browser). Normally you use your ISP’s SMTP server for sending outgoing email; we have smtp available for that within the department and we plan to have allow remote access (via authenticated SMTP) in the relatively near future. The browser based email interface is authenticated, so it will send outgoing email.

Do NOT access coxeter, sphere, or the email server during the upgrade.

A message will be posted here if work is finished sooner than expected.

For a copy of the email sent about the upgrade see:

message about server change

More information

Since pine is the default supported email client in the department we have been able to configure things such that if you are using pine for accessing your email then everything should be transferred automatically for you to the new system. So you do not need to move any mail files around (unless you have mail files which are not in your mail directory, which is the normal place that pine uses).

If you use a .forward file to forward your email then that forwarding should get automatically transferred to the new system (it is done in a somewhat different fashion, but there will be commands which should make manipulating it simpler).
[Last update: January 6, 2008]

lw2 was fixed, but problem has recurred

lw2 temporarily out of service

Blogs working again

Blog work

New CMS website

New Web Resources in the Department

Old IT Status postings

Welcome

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