ITS Communications Corner Announcements

Wednesday 3/19 between 5:30 - 7:30 am there will be a network outage while the main CBB 19 switch is upgraded. The outage includes devices in CBB server rooms 19 and 21, CBB 22, telecom switch, and UNI museum. During the switch upgrade services hosted in these rooms from the UNI network .128.x and it's vlans will be unavailable.

Some specific services affected by the outage:

AD (Active Directory) authentication
ITS file and print server
Telecom billing
Wireless (UNI-Wireless, WiFi-UNI, Guest Wireless)
Calendar
ITS Backup Server
http://www.unitix.edu
VOIP Service
ITS-NS workstations

Other colleges and divisions with servers on this switch:
AF
ESS
CNS

Tomorrow morning, Thursday, March 20, ITS fiber techs will be moving several fiber paths to new fiber between Baker and Curris. This work will begin at approximately 6:00am and should be complete by 6:30am. Individual outages are not expected to last more than 1 minute each. Affected segments include:

• backbone segment (e-mail gateways, www.uni.edu, dhcp servers, authoritative dns, etc.)
  
• memfis
  
• administrative mainframe
  
• myuniverse web servers
  
• ITS unix servers (sunny)
  

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.

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.

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.

Friday, February 6th from 6-6:30am a network core router device will be upgraded. This will cause a brief outage for some network services (VPN and one DNS server). Most people should not see an impact. For some computers there may simply be a brief delay in network response during this time interval.

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.

Tuesday, February 10th, from 6-7am the main network switch in SEC will be upgraded.

This will cause a brief network outage for HPC, SEC, SHC, H2 and WRC. This will also cause an outage for guest wired and wireless connections. These areas won't have Internet or campus network connectivity during the outage.

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.

As you've probably noticed, Active Directory & DNS have suffered a critical failure. We have an emergency support case open with Microsoft to attempt to resolve this issue. We've also modified DHCP to point at the UNIX DNS servers until Active Directory service can be restored. A release/renew should at least restore that basic connectivity, and if users' credentials are cached on their workstations, they can log in, however, things that rely on AD authentication will most likely not be working.

We don't have an ETA yet, but if I had to guess, I'd say it'll be several hours at this point.

Service has been restored. DHCP has been modified to push the AD DNS servers once more. If you have errors persist after obtaining the correct DNS information once more, please report them to Seth Bokelman so that he may investigate them.

We're not entirely sure what caused the problem yet, and are still working with Microsoft in an attempt to narrow it down. Preliminary information suggests that one domain controller had some sort of error/corruption that caused problems on the other two servers.

We will continue to work with Microsoft support to identify the root cause.

The botnet that plagued us earlier this month has returned today. The same internet blocks and holes that were put in place last time have been reinstated.

This attack was not as long-lived as the one earlier this month. We have removed the blocks (and holes) earlier this morning. ssh traffic to campus is now back to "normal".

A wireless service outage is scheduled for this Thursday 11/12 from 6:30-10:30pm. All wireless network systems campus-wide will be affected during this time. Service may be intermittent or completely unavailable throughout this window.

On next Thursday morning, March 4, in the 6:00am hour, the core router
interface for the MEMFIS/Collab/SIS subnet will be modified to allow
more hosts in the subnet. An outage of less than one second is
expected. If unexpected problems should occur, the configuration will
be reverted to the original settings.