Due to the fast approaching beginning of the fall semester, Computing Services is performing several key maintenance activities this week to ensure our systems are ready for the beginning of classes. Typically, all of our scheduled maintenance occurs after 9 PM on Thursday evenings, but due to the need to have vendor support if needed, as well as taking advantage of the reduced number of students currently on campus, a few of the maintenance activities will take place during the day on Thursday, 8/2:

• Beginning at 8:00 AM, the Bradford system which connects students to our ResNet networks will be down for roughly 30 minutes as we reconfigure our networking layout. Minimal outages to the wireless network on campus are expected, and should be resolved by 8:30 AM.
• Beginning at noon, the Pcounter system which tracks student printing activity will be shutdown as we finalize the move of equipment to our new server rack. During this time, students may be unable to print in the labs until roughly 12:30.

The rest of our scheduled maintenance for this week will take place after 9:00 PM during our normally scheduled maintenance period:

• Employee PCs will receive automated security updates and upgrades to the following software packages: Thunderbird, Firefox, Adobe Flash, Adobe Shockwave, and Adobe Reader. Employees are encouraged to log out of their systems but leave them turned on as they leave work on Thursday to assist the completion of these upgrades.
• The campus File Server which hosts all home and shared directories will be down from roughly 9 PM until midnight for a critical OS upgrade. Other various web services will be briefly unavailable during this time as they receive security patches.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at 719-587-7741 or via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you,

Computing Services

The following maintenance activity will take place during our normally scheduled maintenance window:

• At 9 PM, we will be re-enabling storage quotas on all Shared directories. These were disabled previously due to an issue that has since been resolved. There are no anticipated outages or errors to our users due to this maintenance.

As always, please feel free to call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at x7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

****Reminder- Phishing Attempts****

In the last two weeks, many of our campus users have received numerous phishing attempts in their campus email inboxes. As a reminder, Computing Services will NEVER ask for your account information or password via email. Many of these messages are appearing more legitimate than some of the earlier phishing attacks, so please be careful. If you are ever in doubt of the legitimacy of a message, DON’T RESPOND or click any links or open any attachments to the message. Instead, call the Help Desk at 719-587-7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu for further information or to check the legitimacy of an email.

Thank you,

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will be taking place this week during our normally scheduled maintenance window

-Employee and TEC Classroom PCs will be receiving critical Windows security patches. Employees are encouraged to leave their computers on, but log out as you leave work on Thursday. This will allow the updates to install overnight and minimize any interruption to our users.

-Beginning at 9 PM, the back-end storage system for the campus BDMS (Xtender) system will be replaced with a newer storage system. Estimated time to complete this migration is 1 hour.

-Also beginning at 9 PM, we will be migrating a few back-end virtual servers to a new virtual environment, no interruption to user services is anticipated with this maintenance.

-We will be shutting down Dragula, the old Banner server and re-purposing the storage for this system. No interruptions to Banner services are anticipated.

**** New Anti-Virus Program for Employee PCs- Migration Details Below ****

In an effort to further improve our management of employee workstations, as well as to save licensing costs, Computing Services will soon start migrating all computers on campus from Kaspersky Anti-Virus to a new Anti-Virus, System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP). This new anti-virus integrates much more closely with our current systems, and will continue to provide excellent anti-virus protection for all employee PCs. Below are the details of the migration process that will be taking place over the next few weeks:

Kaspersky will be completely uninstalled and SCEP will be installed in its place. This process is all done remotely, without any intervention required by you. In your system tray (by the clock) you will see the Kaspersky icon, a red “K”, disappear and be replaced by a green shield, SCEP. This will not force a reboot, although we recommend rebooting your computer soon after receiving the new Anti-Virus to ensure the process completely finishes. If you have both Kaspersky and SCEP installed on your computer for more than 15-20 minutes please call the Helpdesk at x7741. We will send a technician over to manually remove Kaspersky to ensure that there are no program conflicts.

Computing Services technicians will be going department by department to check each computer to verify that Kaspersky is properly uninstalled and changed to SCEP. We will be staggering this migration building by building, so it may be anytime in the next two weeks that a technician will be checking your workstation. If you still do not have the new Anti-Virus by June 30^th please call the Helpdesk so we can make sure to manually install SCEP for you.

Thank you for your help and support as we press on with our major summer projects. If you have any questions please feel free to contact the Helpdesk at x7741 or email us at computingservices@adams.edu.

Have a great day,

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will be taking place this week:

-During our regularly scheduled Thursday night maintenance window (7/5), we will be reconfiguring our network switching infrastructure to improve redundancy to several key services. Beginning at 9 PM, brief outages to various networking services (Employee email, web servers, home and shared directories) are anticipated, lasting until roughly 11 PM as we perform this reconfiguration.

-In order to minimize interruption to our Banner users during the work week, we will be performing Banner upgrades outside of work hours this Saturday, July 7^th. All Banner services including Banner Web and TouchNet will be down from 7:30 AM until roughly 5:30 PM for these upgrades. Blackboard services will not be affected during this upgrade process.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact the ASU Computing Services Helpdesk at 719-587-7741 or via email at computingservices@adams.edu Thank you for your support and understanding as we continue to upgrade and improve the services we provide to campus.

Computing Services

The following scheduled maintenance activities will take place during this week’s maintenance period:

-The campus Banner Web server Marilyn will be shutdown and migrated from the old VMWare cluster to the new cluster beginning at 8:00 PM and lasting through around midnight. During this time, Banner Web Services will be unavailable to the campus community. This is the final VM Migration from the older cluster to the new VMWare cluster.

-Starting at 9 PM, the campus Streaming Media server will be replaced with a newer server. Anticipated downtime is from 9 PM until roughly 9:30 PM.

-Also starting at 9 PM, the campus blog server, email list server, and how-to wiki server will receive critical security updates. Estimated downtime is roughly 15 minutes.

***Campus Employee Computer Inventory***

Beginning this week, Computing Services will be conducting an inventory of all computers on campus. Student workstudies will be coming through your department to make sure that all computers are labeled properly and in our database. Inventoring a computer will take only a few minutes. Your computer may be inventoried when you are not at your desk, we ask that if you are going to be away from your desk for an extended amount of time you log out to ensure that the inventory process does not disturb anything you may be working on.

If you have an Adams State laptop please bring it by the Computing Services building at your convenience so it can be inventoried and updated.

Thanks for your support as we continue to update and improve the services we provide to the campus. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at x7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Computing Services

Computing Services will be migrating all ASU employee computers to a new management server the week of 6/25/12. The management server, System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (or SCCM 2012) is the system that is used to push all Windows updates, software updates, and new applications. You may get a popup notification that new software is being installed. No reboot will be required.

A new feature of SCCM 2012 is the Software Center, where Computing Services can publish optional installs of software, such as Office 2010. Rather than calling the HelpDesk when you would like to install software, you can install it yourself from the Software Center. Only programs we have built and tested will show up in the Software Center. Right now there are only a few programs listed, but we hope to offer more self-installable programs in the future. We welcome suggestions if there are programs you would like to see there!

After your computer has received the update to the new server you can find the Software Center by going to Start > All Programs > Microsoft System Center 2012 > Software Center.

If you have any questions please contact the ASU Helpdesk at x7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you,

Computing Services

The following scheduled maintenance activities will take place during this week’s maintenance period:

-The campus Xtender (BDMS) server will be shutdown and migrated from the old VMWare cluster to the new cluster beginning at 7:00 PM. Immediately following the completion of this transition, Raven, the Banner forms server will be shutdown and migrated to the new VMWare cluster as well. Being that Xtender is not used after working hours, we’ve moved the maintenance start time up in order to complete these migrations by around midnight.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding as we press on with our improvements to the stability and reliability of our Banner environment. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at x7741 or contact us via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Computing Services

The following maintenance activities will take place after 9 PM during our normally scheduled maintenance window:

-ASU will be converting from the old Banner INB to the new Banner INB connection for PROD on Thursday Night 6/14. By now Banner users should have tested the new connection to the DEVL database. If you have not yet done so, be sure to do that this week. By going through the DEVL connection process, you will setup your browser to work properly once we make the switch to prod.

-As part of this migration, users running Windows 7 will receive a new icon to Banner INB, and will also have the ‘Devl’ and Opera shortcuts removed automatically. Employees are encouraged to log out, but leave your computer turned on when leaving work on Thursday.

For the full announcement that was sent to all Banner Users, please see below.If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at x7741 or via email at computingservices@adams.edu

Thank you,

Computing Services

***Full Announcement***

Below is the original BUGS message regarding this change for those that need to review.

As part of the hardware and software migration towards Banner 9, the banner login (INB) interface will be changing. To assist with this change, we will update only the ‘DEVL’ login initially followed by ‘PROD’ in a couple of weeks. This will allow you to test your desktop on DEVL and resolve any issues before you would need to use it for PROD.

We will be changing the DEVL login on Monday, May 21. We ask that you login to DEVL during that week and test your ability to connect to DEVL. Follow the instructions for your desktop windows system, either XP or Windows 7.

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WINDOWS XP USERS

If your computer is running on windows XP, you can test the login anytime starting May 21 by launching your current banner INB (Internet Explorer) program and selecting the DEVL radio button. You will likely have to

answer some prompts as it re-configures itself, such as allowing a java applet to run.

Specific instructions can be found at:

https://howto.adams.edu/index.php/Inital_Login_to_Banner

The PROD radio button will continue to function as normal.

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WINDOWS 7 USERS

If you are running on windows 7:

A new IE (Internet Explorer) INB icon will be pushed out to your desktop during the week of May 21. Watch for that icon to appear on your desktop. When it arrives, follow the same procedures as for the XP users, namely, launch the new IE INB, select the DEVL radio button and follow the instructions at this link.

https://howto.adams.edu/index.php/Inital_Login_to_Banner

Caution: Do NOT select the PROD radio button, it will not work and may cause IE to crash.

Please continue to use the Opera browser to access PROD during this period.

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ALL USERS

If you have problems, please contact the help desk at x7741.

Thank you

The following maintenance activities will take place after 9 PM during our normally schedule maintenance window:

-Important security and Operating System updates will be installed on the how-to wiki server, campus listserv, campus LDAP servers, and other web services. These systems will require a reboot, but users are anticipated to experience less than 5 minutes of service interruption.
-An upgrade to the campus VM storage arrays will be performed resulting in a brief outage to the blogs server and portions of the Student One Stop pages. This upgrade is being done to improve performance of our storage arrays.

*** Important Information for Managers of Departmental Email Accounts ***

If you are responsible for the management of a departmental email account (such as ‘ascoffice@adams.edu’) please click the link below to read the instructions for the renaming process due to the University name change:

http://blogs.adams.edu/computing/?p=521

If you have any questions or concerns, please call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at x7741.

Thank you,

Computing Services

The message below was sent to the managers of ASU Departmental Email Accounts. Please read and follow the steps if you are the person responsible for updating the name of the account.

****************************************************

Greetings,

You are receiving this email because, according to our records, you are the person responsible for managing a departmental email account. Typically, these email accounts start with “asc,” such as “asccompserv@adams.edu”  and are used for coordinated       communication with students and customers. If you are no longer the person responsible for managing this departmental email account, please forward this message to the person who is, or call the help desk at x7741 so that we can update our records.

With the recent change from ASC to ASU, Computing Services has been developing a process to deal with the renaming of these departmental accounts. Below is the step-by-step process that we ask the managers of these accounts to follow in order to update the email address:

1.           Choosing a new email account name- In a recent Cabinet meeting, it was agreed that the recommended naming       convention for departmental email accounts would be as follows: Whenever possible, choose a single word, or two words that accurately describes your department/area, and remove the “ASC” completely. For example, if the current email address is “ascadmissions@adams.edu,” we would suggest using simply admissions@adams.edu or if the current email address is ascstuaffair@adams.edu, we would suggest studentaffairs@adams.edu. The intent of this recommendation would be to make these email addresses simple, and avoid using shortened words or abbreviated departmental names whenever possible. However, if there is a compelling reason to include “ASU” as the prefix such as asuathletics@adams.edu, this is permitted as well. **NOTE- Please consider potential conflicts with other departments on campus when deciding on the new account name. For instance, heal@adams.edu might be obvious as the Higher Education Administration & Leadership program,       but could be confused with something in the nursing program. If you think there may be conflicting names, please communicate with the other departments to coordinate.
2.           Submit a work ticket to Computing Services. To submit  a ticket directly, please visit http://helpdesk.adams.edu,       login with your Adams State username and password, and create a ticket under the “email” queue. If you have further questions or would prefer assistance in submitting the ticket, please call the help desk at 7741 and our help desk staff can enter the ticket for you. Be sure to indicate the existing email address as well as the new email address you are requesting. If you manage multiple departmental email accounts, you may put them all under one work ticket.
3.           Follow the progress of the ticket. Once the ticket is opened, our email administrator will begin the process of renaming       the departmental account. Watch your email for updates from our helpdesk ticketing software which will keep you informed of the progress.
4.        If you receive a “bad username or password” failure trying to log into your account after submitting a ticket to have your account renamed, please try logging in again using the new account name with the same password before contacting the helpdesk.
5.           Forwarding and “bounce” messages. In order to make this transition smoother for our customers, we will be setting an       automatic forwarding of emails that are sent to the old account to the new account. We will also be sending the original sender of the message a “bounce” message that will ensure them that their message was delivered, but that they should       update their address book with the new email address. The forwarding and bounce messages for all of the campus’s departmental accounts will be in place through January 1^st, 2013.

If you have any questions regarding this process or would like assistance, please call the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at extension 7741.

Thank you,

Computing Services