July 26, 2007
Please don't ignore: Every computer user is potentially affected
Quick summary: Don't open email attachments from a sender you do not know or trust.Longer summary: There have been a rash of recent email born viruses, Trojans and spam delivered with new and intriguing marketing. The most damaging have been e-greeting card links which connect you to a virus program and run on your computer in your name. Curiosity can kill a kitty. Several computers we cleaned of these menaces took the computer users off-line for 2 or 3 business days. Less damaging, in fact no damage except wasted time, have been .pdf attachments with the usual spam advertising for a plethora of embarrassing products.
Conclusion: You are special, but strangers are NOT sending you greeting cards or .pdf files for only you to read. It is safe to say that no legitimate Internet Greeting Card company will send cards without the name of the sender. If you don't know the sender, the sender is not a familiar address (ie @xxmail.maricopa.edu), you can delete the email with a clear conscience (and a clean computer). If you delete something you should not have, the sender can resend it. If you have an accumulation of unknowns in your SPAM quarantine, trust the quarantine, allow the SPAM filter to do its job and delete the junk for you.
Thank you.
June 7, 2007
New OIT Employees! |
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We are happy to announce that Jeffery Necker has accepted the position of Lead Hardware Tech in the OIT hardware area. As most of you know, Jeff started working at Glendale in the Instructional Computing department as the Animation Lab Tech. In addition to his Animation experience, Jeff brings a long history of building and servicing computers in the private sector.
Please stop by and congratulate Jeff when you have a moment. |
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We are very pleased to announce that starting June 1, Isaiah Washington has joined our crew as Manager of Computer Operations. Isaiah comes to us after more than 26 years with Honeywell / Bull supporting Bull and their customers. Isaiah will be managing our Network Operations Center, guiding the team responsible for maintaining the servers and network gear that makes up our technology infrastructure.
Please join us in welcoming Isaiah to the GCC family. |
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April 24, 2007
Regular network maintenance window, Wednesday April 25th, 4 to 7 am, summary.There are no major server systems undergoing upgrades during this maintenance window. A number of minor systems will have patches or new software installed. These are mostly systems not directly accessed by either Glory/Netware or eGCC/GCCAZ systems and thus will cause no visible downtime to students or employees.
The one system upgrade planned that may affect employees is an upgrade to the calendar server. This was put off last week due to complications with other maintenance being performed. The calendar system will be off line for a little longer than a reboot of the system, clients left attached overnight will be cut off during this time but can reconnect as soon as the system is back up.
Thank you.
Maintenance wrap up For Spring Break 2007
Wireless Network Upgrade
The wireless network was updated for both security and speed issues. This included updating firmware on many of the wireless access points and changing VLAN addresses for the wireless system. The updated system will work with SSL3 certificates allowing the latest browsers and Operating systems to connect more securely. Systems affected include all wireless laptops, PDAs and Classroom instructor's stations that operate from a "Palette Lite" image.eGCC Environment
Storage space for eGCC environment was increased. This will affect all eGCC (GCCAZ) users, students, faculty and staff who use or will eventually use the eGCC system. To help control future space usage individual quota restrictions were applied. These quotas are comparable to the previous palette quotas. The quotas are currently just being reported at login time quotas are planned to be enforced April 2nd.
Disaster Recovery and data migration techniques practiced, training on the latest hardware in use. During the space increase volumes of data were moved to newly created empty volumes. This was an opportunity to verify how new equipment handles such changes and to verify backup and restore procedures. Softgrid application delivery system database server was updated to faster hardware and software updates. While this might not show a dramatic increase in speed for the Softgrid system it does provide a measurable increase in performance at a server level. In combination with additional tweaks and experiments with Softgrid this will add to better user experience.
Genesis account management system, migrated to faster, fault-tolerant hardware. Genesis is the beginning of all GCC network account creation and management. Other minor maintenance included updates to the AntiVirus server, workstation imaging systems, OS and security patches to multiple servers, server room rewiring and server room general cleanup.
GC VAX and SIS
The VAX system was moved to a Charon VAX emulator. This represents the first major hardware upgrade to the VAX system in many years. This should ensure solid hardware for the VAX beyond the migration to the new student system. A measurement of the speed increases is represented in the following...
| Job Type (NAME) |
Elapsed Time (BU) (HH:MM:SS.hh) |
CPU Time (BU) (HH:MM:SS.hh) | GCC to District Xfer Speed (BU) | Elapsed Time (AU) (HH:MM:SS.hh) | CPU Time (AU) (HH:MM:SS.hh) | GCC to District Xfer Speed (AU) |
| Disk-to-disk copy (BJCOPY) | 00:24:11.92 | 00:00:20.94 | N/A | 00:02:49.35 | 00:00:38.72 | N/A |
| Network copy (ODSCOPY) | 04:49:13.31 | 00:49:19.17 | ~5Mbps | 01:26:06.91 | 00:18:35.68 | ~20Mbps |
A few issues dealt with after the maintenance.
Quota issues to resolve: Currently a portion of user quota is consumed by system files causing quota warnings before the user has actually exceeded the quota. These issues will be addressed in some fashion before quotas are actually enforced.
After increasing the storage and moving volumes around to take advantage of the new space some folders were orphaned, removing the ownerÕs access rights. Most of this problem was solved on Friday but some were not found and resolved until Monday morning. The effect was that some people were unable to see their home space (H: drive), in other cases the web pages launched from public.www folders did not work. We believe most of these are already cleared up but if you experience problems we want to hear about it.
The Genesis system ran into unforeseen delays resulting in a account management utilities being off line on Monday morning. All services were restored by noon.
