The following maintenance activities will take place this Thursday evening:

• UPDATED*** After 9 PM there may be brief outages to Banner services due to a network switch replacement
• Email Storage Optimization- All email services will be down between 9 PM and midnight as we diagnose and attempt to correct email storage issues.
• Employee, Lab and TEC Classroom computers will receive critical Microsoft security updates starting after 9 PM. Please leave your employee computers on when you leave work on Thursday

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the ASC Computing Services Helpdesk at x7741

One of the Computing Services staff members recently forwarded this phishing test:  http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/

It’s not an easy test. Most of the Computing Services staff that took it missed at least one question, including me. We all thought the test provided some good clues on how to identify a phishing or spam email. Take the test and let me know what you think. Was it helpful or confusing? Did you learn something new?

Since we’re in the midst of income tax season, before you take the test, I’ll give you one hint. The IRS never conducts business via email.

Mike.

(The test is copyrighted by SonicWALL, Inc. and presented with its approval)

We will be implementing the FORMS server upgrade. Forms will be unavailable for about 3 hours Saturday morning beginning at 9:00 AM.

• Banner- Thursday night, we will be taking Banner offline to install Financial Aid upgrades. Banner will be unavailable from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM. WebCT will still be available, but self service Banner will be unavailable.
• Banner- Saturday, February 13th, we will be implementing the FORMS server upgrade. Forms will be unavailable for about 3 hours Saturday morning beginning at 9:00 AM.
• The campus streaming server will be migrated Thursday night beginning at 9:00 PM, estimated unavailability is 15 minutes.
• Microsoft Servers (AD, print server, etc) will be patched beginning at 9:00 PM, estimated unavailability is 15 minutes at most to various MS services.
• MAC OS X server- Disaster recovery process and updates will occur Thursday beginning at 5:00 PM. No user impact is anticipated.
• A patch will be applied to the Aberdeen storage device, no user impact is anticipated.

On 9 Feb 2010 (Today)

We will be testing the FORMS server upgrade. This is the upgrade that failed last Thursday. We will be taking the FORMS server offline at 7:00 PM tonight, testing the upgrade and then restoring the forms server back to the original configuration. Staff will log in to banner as normal Wednesday morning. This will not interrupt any WebCt or self service banner (including one-stop links).

On 11 Feb 09 (Thursday)

We will be taking banner offline to install Financial Aid upgrades. Banner will be unavailable from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM. WebCt will still be available, but self service banner will be unavailable.

On 13 Feb 10  (Saturday)

We will be implementing the FORMS server upgrade. Forms will be unavailable for about 3 hours Saturday morning beginning 9:00 AM.

• A replacement Barracuda email system will be installed starting after 9:00 PM. Anticipated email system downtime is 2 hours.
• Several services will be restarted Thursday night after 9:00 PM including lists.adams.edu, blogs.adams.edu, and howto.adams.edu. There is no anticipated noticeable downtime to these services.

While email attachments are a popular and convenient way to send documents, they are also a common source of viruses. Use caution when opening attachments, even if they appear to have been sent by someone you know. Continue reading →

• A migration of the Faculty and Staff email server system will begin Wednesday night at 9:00 PM and last roughly 3 hours. Email services will be temporarily unavailable during this time.

Banner will be unavailable while performing needed year end updates beginning at 4:45 PM on Tuesday, 22 December 2009. Web CT will not be affected. Please ensure that all processes have completed by 4:45 PM Tuesday and that you have logged out of banner. Continue reading →