IT Status (Dept of Mathematics, U of Toronto)
The last phase of the University’s migration to Office 365 (locally called UTmail+), moving the old UTORmail accounts prior to the decommissioning of that service, will take place soon. An email has been sent to the list of UTORmail accounts of people in our department that was sent to us. You do not have to do anything about this and it does not affect your departmental email.
Here is the information that was send earlier about the migration:
The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates this afternoon.
The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates this afternoon.
The mail server update ran into an issue (the Puremessage spam-filtering system would not start) that made finishing before 5pm infeasible so the update was cancelled. We now expect that we can avoid that particular issue and will reschedule the update at a later date.
We have many (29) old monitors which are small and/or old (at least 10 years), 5 old printers and 2 boxes of 3.5″ floppy disks which we will be giving to the swap shop after the end of this week.
If you are interested in any of this then we can show you the hardware and you are invited to take some home. This is “as is”…we don’t know if anything works, what resolution the monitors are, if toner cartridges are still available for the printers, etc. We can only provide power cords and a video cable if you want a monitor.
Please email requests@math.toronto.edu if you would like to see any of this.
The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the updates this afternoon.
The departmental servers appear to be working fine after the security updates this afternoon.
A major electrical shutdown has been scheduled by the University. Bahen will have a complete power shutdown on:
Wednesday January 3, 2018 starting at 8:30pm and ending at 8:30am the next day
All the departmental systems (coxeter, sphere, mail, web, etc.) will be brought down starting at 7:00pm before the outage and brought back up the following morning. We estimate that things should be back to normal by about 9:30am.
We will also have to shutdown the machines in 215 Huron since there will be several brief (less than 1 minute) power interruptions in that building during that time.
In the event that special circumstances arise then, if time permits, a notice will be posted here.
Apple has released an update for the bug mentioned in the previous posting.
Please ensure that you have this update if you are running “High Sierra”.
There is a very serious macOS bug which you should fix immediately.
See
for step-by-step details.
Below is a message that was written for users in the Department of Cell & Systems Biology (thank you to Ryan MacDonald).
An extremely serious flaw in the latest version of Mac OS was publicized today. If you have a Mac running “High Sierra”, version 10.13.0 or 10.13.1, your computer is vulnerable. Please follow the steps below to protect your data.
“High Sierra” was released in September. Any new Mac purchased in the past two months has it. Previous versions of Mac OS, including “Sierra”, are not known to be affected. You can confirm which version you have by clicking the Apple menu / About This Mac.
Apple will certainly issue a patch in the next day or two, but until then we strongly recommend taking the following mitigating steps. This changes your machine’s root (master) password from blank to something you know. If you wish you can use the same as the password you use on your own account.
– Run the built-in Terminal app. It is in the Applications / Utilities folder, or search for Terminal using Spotlight.
– A terminal window will appear with a prompt, such as:
Somebody’s iMac:~ jonyappleseed$
– Into this window, type or paste:
sudo passwd root
– At the Password: prompt, enter your regular account password. No characters will be displayed as you type.
– Next you will be asked to enter a new password, and then to confirm it:
Changing password for root.
New password:
Retype new password:
– If this completes without error, you can close the Terminal program and relax. If it fails for any reason, repeat the steps. Note that the password you are creating won’t be needed to use the machine, it is only there to protect your computer from local and remote attack.
Over the next couple of days, check your computer’s App Store / Updates page for a proper fix from Apple.
Contact us if you have questions or need assistance with the steps above.
thanks
