ITS Communications Corner Announcements

ITS is scheduled to have two racks of computer application servers offline early Thursday morning as electricians complete work on the power distribution system within the central ITS computer room. Downtime window is between 6am and 8am on Thursday, though actual downtime is anticipated to be less than two hours. We’re optimistic we could be back online by 6:30am assuming no problems are encountered.

Affected systems include (but are not limited to):

• ITS Central File Server (Megatron)
• VMWare Server (Ironhide) containing:
  • Printing server (Jazz)
  • Antivirus server (ITS-NAV)
  • Others
• Calendar server (calendar.uni.edu)
• Microsoft updates server (WSUS)
• ITS User Services Supported Users Backup Server

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building (formerly known as the East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

There will be a maintenance window from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM Wednesday, October 15th, for the voice mail/auto attendant aspect of the UNI telecommunications system.

The maintenance work is such that it should NOT be service-affecting; however an outage during the window is possible.

If service is impacted, it would affect receipt/placement of voice mail messages and auto attendant activity (Press 1 for x; Press 2 for y; etc.)

Thank You
Randy Hayes
Voice Services Manager

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building (formerly known as the East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

To enable electrical upgrades in the Gilchrist Hall telecommunications switch room, we have scheduled a maintenance window for Saturday, October 18, 2008 from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM.

During this early morning maintenance window we anticipate a total voice system outage lasting less than one hour. No calls will be received or may be placed on the UNI telecommunication system during the outage, voice messaging will not be in service, and auto attendants and call center systems will not be in operation (no "Press 1, 2, or 3 for X;
no calls queued with music-on-hold for departments, ticketing, etc).

Students, faculty, staff, and visitors who are on campus should utilize cell phones, email, texting, etc., for general communications during this outage. UNI staff utilizing the campus 800 Mhz Radio system can continue to use them during this outage, although the telephone access feature will not be available.

FOR EMERGENCIES: Cell phones should be used to dial 911, or you can call UNI Public Safety at 273-4000 or 273-2712.

An email will be sent to the ITS-ANNOUNCE mail list when the maintenance window has been completed.

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building (formerly known as the East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

ITS will perform network switch maintenance for the morning of Saturday 10/18/08 from 6am-11am. In the process network switches will be rebooted one at a time. Each network switch reboot takes approximately 5 minutes and during these times individuals will experience multiple 5 minute outages during the maintenance window. The total number of outages your workstation is subjected to is relative to the number of switches to which it is linked. This will affect 340 devices covering every networked building on campus except the dorms.

For example, if you're in SSC the network switch your computer directly connects to and also the corresponding uplink network switch will both be rebooted. This means that during the outage timeframe you will have 2 separate 5-minute network outages where you will not be able to access network resources including e-mail, webmail, MEMFIS, etc.

UNI services hosted in our central data centers will not have their path to the Internet disrupted.

If you need additional assistance please contact the Computer Consulting Center (CCC) at (319) 273-5555. The CCC is located in Room 36 ITTC Building (formerly known as the East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

Flash (USB) Drive Problem: Occasionally, when you open a Microsoft Office file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) from a USB key drive (or any drive with the FAT32 file system), modify the file, and then attempt to save the file, an error message will appear and the original file will be lost. This problem has been reported at other institutions as well as at UNI. We are working to find a solution.

See workaround document.

The Problem: Occasionally, when you open a Microsoft Office file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) from a USB key drive (or any drive with the FAT32 file system), modify the file, and then attempt to save the file, an error message will appear and the original file will be lost. This problem has been reported at other institutions as well as at UNI. We are working to find a solution.

See full description.