ITS Communications Corner Announcements

ITS is upgrading the CatID and Email environment beginning Friday May 15th starting at 6:00PM and ending at 9:00AM Saturday May 16th.

During the maintenance all Email access will be unavailable. All other services using CatID (MyUNIverse, eLearning/WebCT, etc.) will continue to function normally, however, users will not be able to change their CatID password starting 1 hour prior to the upgrade nor during the upgrade process.

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, for hours see http://www.uni.edu/its/us/ccc/.

During the initial steps of our CatID upgrade we ran into problems with the Load balancer and our SSL Certificate issuer. The technical issues with the load-balancer were identified and resolved, however diagnosing and fixing the problem took considerable time.

As a result we reverted back to the current platform. CatID was returned to full service at 1:00 am, email delivery resumed at 1:10am, and our web-based email clients (WebAccess and Webmail) were returned at 3:00am.

Currently WebAccess and Webmail are using self-signed SSL Certificates and users will need to approve the certificate when prompted. We apologize for the inconvenience of the self-signed certificates. We will replace these with the proper certificates as soon as possible.

We will be scheduling another outage to perform this upgrade as soon as is feasible.

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, for hours see http://www.uni.edu/its/us/ccc/

The Blackboard/WebCT learning management and electronic portfolio system will be restarted Wednesday, May 20, 2009, at 6:00 a.m. to apply a system patch to the application servers. The system will be available by 7:00 a.m.

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 is upgrading the CatID and Email environment beginning Monday, May 25th, starting at 7:00AM and ending at 9:00PM.

During the maintenance all Email access will be unavailable. All other services using CatID (MyUNIverse, eLearning/WebCT, etc.) will continue to function normally, however, users will not be able to change their CatID password starting 1 hour prior to the upgrade nor during the upgrade process.

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.

The Blackboard/WebCT learning management and electronic portfolio system will be restarted Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 6:00 a.m. to apply a system patch to the application servers. The system will be available by 7:00 a.m.

There were complications with yesterday's email patching effort. ITS staff were able to overcome the issues and completed the majority of the patching effort.

WebAccess is being left down until later this afternoon in order to address other issues. WebMail is up and is performing well.

Thunderbird, Outlook, Pegasus Mail, etc. users may receive a message intermittently that says "Unable to connect. You may have exceeded the maximum number of connections to this server..." We appear to be hitting IMAP and POP mail limits and are researching the causes. These problems are intermittent and we expect to have them resolved by early afternoon. In the meantime, wait a few minutes and try again.

Please continue to address problems directly to both Viviana.Dragu@uni.edu and Kevan.Forest@uni.edu.

It seems that issues with Thunderbird, Outlook, Pegasus Mail, etc. users have cleared up with the changes that occurred late this morning.

WebMail appears to be working well, however it is possible that you may happen to login when a process is restarting, causing you to experience a slow login. If this happens, close your browser and try again and you will most likely get right in.

We're worried that opening-up WebAccess to the general populace will increase the strain on the the clients. From past experience this would often bring down both web-based clients. We are actively looking for ways to improve performance and will return both web-based clients as soon as is possible.

We apologize for the inconvenience of having WebAccess unavailable, however we would like to ensure that until the issue is fixed we provide as stable an environment as is possible.

Please let us know if there are any questions. We will send out an update when one is available, by Thursday morning at the latest. Refer problems to both Viviana.Dragu@uni.edu and Kevan.Forest@uni.edu.

There are continuing web-client email problems this morning after the scheduled daily restart of the clients. We have moved the restart back a few hours for tomorrow to alleviate the problem in the future.

Unfortunately the restart process this morning, along with increasing usage, are loading down our email nodes. We have removed the WebMail and WebAccess buttons in an attempt to limit the traffic to web-based email for awhile to let the processes settle down. We will return web-based email as soon as possible.

We are still working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience with the web-clients.

Please let us know if there are any questions. Refer problems to both Viviana.Dragu@uni.edu and Kevan.Forest@uni.edu

We have restored the web-mail button. We will watch the server performance and load.

We are working on a change to the data cached by the web-clients to, hopefully help with the web-mail stability issues.

Again we apologize for the problems with the web-clients and we are actively working to fix the problem.

On Saturday, May 30, from 5:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. the following systems are going to be unavailable for system maintenance.

• Emas and EDI Recruiting Software
• Webfocus Reporting
• The Compliance System
• The Formscape System

A follow up notification will be sent out when the maintenance is complete.

Steps taken yesterday afternoon to resolve the web-client email access problem seemed to have worked.

WebAccess has been enabled. We will be keeping an eye on the Collab servers to see how things run the rest of the day.

Again we apologize for the inconvenience of the performance issues with the web-clients. Hopefully our changes have resolved our current issues.

All MEMFIS applications will be unavailable from 6:00 am to 4:00 pm on Saturday, June 6th. This will affect all MEMFIS applications including self service and timecard processing. There should not be any noticeable impact for users after the upgrade completes.

The VMWare server named "Ironhide" will be down for maintenance on the
morning of June 2 between 5:30 and 6:30.

User-facing services affected include:

Guest Wireless System
Jazz Print Server
Gears Sharepoint Server
SCC1 Print Server
NotifyLink Test Server
ITS-ET Showcase Machine
RADIUS-2

Service is expected to be restored by 6:30. If this early morning time
period doesn't work for you for some reason, please let Seth Bokelman know.