The departmental servers coxeter and sphere and the mail, web, share, and ptr servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, May 22, 2019 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5pm.
Serious Windows 7 Vulnerabilities
May 16, 2019 by
Microsoft has issued advisory which describes a serious Remote Desktop (RDP) vulnerability. Attacks can occur with no passwords needed.
According to SANS:
Title: Microsoft patches 79 vulnerabilities, 22 critical
Description: Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing a variety of vulnerabilities in several of its products. The latest Patch Tuesday covers 79 vulnerabilities, 22 of which are rated “critical,” 55 that are considered “important” and one “moderate.”
NOTE: Windows 7 is end of life in 7 months. Please update to Windows 10 now.
Network switch upgrades on Wednesday, May 1 from 11am to 3pm
April 30, 2019 by
We will be upgrading the last four network edge switches for our main math network in Bahen on Wednesday, May 1st from 11am to 3pm. The following offices will be affected:
BA6120 BA6191 BA6193 BA6200 BA6202 BA6204 BA6206 BA6208 BA6209
BA6211 BA6212 BA6214 BA6216 BA6218 BA6224 BA6226 BA6228 BA6230
BA6232 BA6234 BA6236 BA6242 BA6244 BA6246 BA6248 BA6250 BA6252
BA6256 BA6258 BA6260 BA6262 BA6264 BA6266 BA6268 BA6270 BA6283
BA6290 BA6290A BA6290A BA6290C BA6290G BA6290G BA6290J BA6291
The lw2 and lw3 printers will be affected by these outages, so they will be unavailable while their network connections are being upgraded.
The Computer Room (BA6200), as listed above, will also be affected.
“mutt” email client updated on coxeter
April 12, 2019 by
The “mutt” email client has been updated on coxeter, from version 1.5.20 to version 1.11.4. Please revise your “.muttrc” file for any changes, the man page for which can be found on coxeter at:
/usr/local/software/mutt-1.11.4/share/man/txt/muttrc.txt
The old version is still available by running “/usr/bin/mutt”.
Power outage at Bahen
April 4, 2019 by
At approximately 19:30 on Thursday April 4th there was an extensive power outage across campus which also affected the Bahen building. Power to Bahen returned at approximately 20:15, and efforts to restart the computer systems at the Mathematics Department commenced at 20:30. All systems were back online by 22:15.
Default resolution for Ricoh scanning is now 400dpi
March 29, 2019 by
Since the scanning done on the Ricoh photocopiers in BA6290A and PG104A is primarily for Crowdmark and the photocopiers had different resolution defaults we decided to make them the same. It was suggested that 400 dpi would be good, so we have done that. If you think that 300 dpi would be a better default please let us know.
There seems to be no way to change the default contrast setting and whether one wishes to have the scanning set to one- or two-sided on these photocopiers.
Short network outage for some rooms on Wednesday 2019mar20 from 4:15-5:00pm
March 19, 2019 by
On Wednesday March 20 during the server upgrade time from 4:15-5:00pm we will be testing one of the new switches that we will be installing for VoIP. People in the following rooms will be affected:
BA6102 BA6103 BA6104 BA6106 BA6107 BA6108 BA6110 BA6112 BA6114 BA6116 BA6118
This will be a short test and we expect that computers in those offices will not be without network connections for more than 15 minutes.
Networking Hardware Update for VoIP
March 15, 2019 by
We will be updating our networking hardware in the near future so that our department can more easily join the new VoIP telecommunications system that UofT has selected. We have to change many network switches and there will be two-hour windows when network connections for some people will stop working. Occassionally there will be short (less than 10 minutes) network outages for whole networks.
Information about the schedule for these outages will be posted on this blog.
For more information about the UofT VoIP project please see:
Updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday March 20, 2019
March 15, 2019 by
The departmental servers coxeter and sphere and the mail, web, share, and ptr servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, March 20, 2019 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5pm.
Spear Phishing Warning and General Digital Security
January 9, 2019 by
MORE INSIDIOUS EMAIL PHISHING
In addition to the usual reports of both internal and external email/website phishing we are seeing a rise in “spear phishing” where an attempt is made to compromise a specific user using publicly-available information to appear to be a trusted entity. The end of this email describes such an attack initiated with a telephone call that happened recently in our department.
If you receive a suspicious email please feel free to report it to:
The University also has a reporting system centrally at:
Here are some tips to avoid a phishing attack:
http://main.its.utoronto.ca/news/10-tips-to-avoid-a-phishing-attack/
In general we all need to be careful with our digital security. Please see:
https://securitymatters.utoronto.ca/
for the University’s suggestions for various groups for security.
RECENT CASE REPORTED BY A FACULTY MEMBER
Someone finds an online poster for a future conference. They look up a speaker’s office phone number and email address. They call the speaker’s office, and tell them that they are booking the hotel for them for the conference (they know the conference location and dates). They ask the speaker to provide their credit card information to secure the room; they say that the credit card will not be charged, that this is just to secure the room. However, the organizers of conference confirmed they did not place the call to the speaker.
