ITS Communications Corner Announcements

STUDENT E-MAIL ACCOUNTS TO BE REMOVED:
UNI e-mail accounts for students not registered for the spring semester are disabled,
archived to tape, and removed from the server after the end of the third week of classes. This year, that process will begin on Monday, Jan. 29.

The UNI migration to Collaboration Suite has been postponed until after the March Board of Regents meeting. Campus email will be unavailable beginning at 5 p.m., Friday, March 23. The new system will be made available hopefully, by the start of the business day on Monday, March 26. Email received during the conversion will be delivered once the new system is up and running. Faculty, staff, students and emeritus employees will have improved email capabilities, and email quotas will increase for students.

UNI Email and UNI mailing lists will be unavailable during the planned upgrade project this winter break. No email will be lost, email sent to UNI students, faculty and staff during the upgrade time period will be delivered after the upgrade completes.

UNI email will be unavailable starting at 7 a.m. on Sunday, December 30th, until the upgrade completes. The system upgrade is anticipated to be completed no later than 3 p.m. This upgrade will improve email system reliability and address a number of currently known problems and issues.

WebAccess Email Client Not Working

This is a quick note to give an update on our status with Web Access Client (WAC).

As is shown on the Email Web Client launch page the button for the WebAccess Client has been removed. Following the January upgrade both the WebAccess and the WebMail clients began to error and restart themselves sporadically when under heavy utilization. By eliminating the use of the WebAccess Client we reduced these errors (and outages) from hourly to once a day or so. We have been actively working, daily, with Oracle Support to resolve this issue, and will continue to do so until the issue is resolved, and both clients are in service.

Email, MyUNIverse, WebCT, & ResQPortal will be unavailable starting at 11:59pm Friday evening, February 8, 2008, for up to two hours for system maintenance.

The following systems and their associated applications will be impacted:

• UNI Collaboration Suite (Email, all CatID authentication)
  
• MyUNIverse
  
• WebCT
  
• ResQ Portal
  

On Wednesday, May 21st between 6 AM and 7 AM, ITS will be implementing a new load-balancer for the Collaboration Suite systems.

The change will require no outage and should not be noticeable to those using the
systems.

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 (old East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

ITS will be applying operating system patches beginning at 6am on Saturday July 12, 2008. Maintenance is expected to be complete by 10am.

The following systems and services will be unavailable during the maintenance window:
CatID
Campus E-Mail (Collab)
MEMFIS
MyUniverse
WebCT
Student Web Registration (ResQPortal)
Student Registration (Mainframe)
Discoverer
Webfocus
COD XML System
ResNet Registration
Phone Book (all J2EE applications)
Heat
Library systems

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 (old East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

The Facility Services message below explains that the electricity will be shut off in the Curris Business Building August 2, 2008. In preparation, Email, WebCT, and MyUNIverse will be shut down at 5:30 a.m. and all computer systems in the computer room in Curris will be shut down at 6:30 a.m. This includes the mainframe (QWS3270/IBM Mainframe) application transactions (SI12, SI70, etc.) include Cashiering, Admissions, Accounts Receivable, Financial Aid, Registrar's, Public Safety, Residence, and all Web services for registering, instant transcripts, degree audits, parking permits, etc. Campus access to the internet will be maintained during this outage.

The systems will come back online once power becomes available and we expect all the various systems to become available by mid-afternoon.

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 (old East Gym). Consultants are available to provide hands-on assistance daily Monday through Friday during University Business Hours.

There will be a planned power outage in the Curris Business Building on Saturday, November 29, 2008, beginning midnight Friday and continuing until 8:00a.m. Saturday morning for phase II improvements to the Curris Data Center infrastructure. Prior to the loss of electrical power, systems will be shutdown in an orderly fashion beginning as early at 9:00p.m., Friday night.

This outage will affect only the Curris Data Center. All of the Services housed in the Curris Data Center including Email, MEMFIS, WebCT, MyUNIverse, ITS File & Print services, SIS applications and wireless internet connections will be unavailable during this time frame.

Additionally, applications for A&F, Marketing & Public Relations, CNS, ESS, DOR, and Advancement not specifically mentioned will be affected as well.

Campus access to the internet will be maintained during this outage.

During this time all services will be unavailable. Services will return once maintenance is complete - this may be earlier than the 8:00a.m. deadline.

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 Collaboration Suite team needs an estimated eight hour maintenance window to perform a database upgrade and increase space for email recovery, there will be an outage on Saturday, December 27, 2008 from 12:01 AM to 8:00 AM. This outage will affect *all* applications authenticating with CatID including E-Mail, MyUNIverse, eLearning (WebCT) and mainframe QWS3270 transactions.

All mainframe (QWS3270) application transactions (SI12, SI70, RS04, CVBH, SI19, etc), which includes Cashiering, Admissions, Accounts Receivable, Financial Aid, Registrar's, Public Safety, Residence and all Web services for registering, instant transcripts, degree audits, parking permits, etc.

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.

This week there are two planned Internet outages due to network maintenance. The maintenance work is intended to resolve a problem with network statistics reporting.

The first outage is scheduled for Friday, January 23rd, from 6:00-6:20 am. If necessary, there will be a second longer outage on Sunday, January 25th, from 6:00-7:00 am.

These outages will disrupt *all* off-campus Internet access and services provided including UNI email system, web sites, eLearning (WebCT), MEMFIS, etc.

On-campus use of these UNI services will continue to function normally and all email will be delivered.

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 changing the UNI email system to enhance email recovery capability. This improvement requires a complete email system outage which will occur on Sunday, March 01, 2009, from 12:01 AM to 3:00 AM. This outage will affect all campus email access methods (Webmail, WebAccess, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.). All other CatID services will continue to function normally.

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 Friday April 24th starting at 7:00PM and ending at 9:00AM Saturday April 25th.

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 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/

This Outage Has Been Postponed !!!

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/

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.

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.

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.

The postmaster is getting reports that multiple people are not receiving emails from off campus. She is on the phone with support and updates well be sent as the status changes.

It has been verified that we are currently not receiving emails from off campus. The postmaster is working with support on the issue. Messages being sent to our domains from off campus should be receiving a retry failure so, they should be resent when the issue is resolved. Updates will be posted as we have them.

We are now accepting emails from off campus and emails that were already on IronMail are being processed and delivered.

Due to hardware changes related to preparing for the new student system, all oracle based systems will be down Saturday 07/25/2009 from 7am - 10am, with the exception email will be down from 5AM to 10AM.

Due to hardware changes related to preparing for the new student system, all Oracle-based systems will be down Saturday 07/25/2009 from 7AM - 10AM. Email will be down from 3AM to 10AM rather than beginning at 5AM as previously announced.

Email and CatID will be shut down for operating system and application patches, specifically to fix web based email client problems with regard to email attachments and timeout errors.
This will take a period of one hour Friday, August 7, starting at 10pm.

There was a brief outage for approximately 30 minutes of the web based email clients (WebAccess and WebMail) this morning. This outage did not affect email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. Service was restored to the web based services by 10:50 a.m.