October 2005 Archives

You may notice that mathserv and the linux workstations feel a bit laggy for approximately ten minutes at the top of each hour. This is because we have begun mirroring mail folders to the fail-over server every hour instead of once a day. We will be working on reducing the impact of these backups on system performance. Web and mail-client users shouldn't feel much of a difference; pine and graphical file browsing will be most strongly affected.

The HH-303 printer was inaccessible since Friday evening; it's working as of 9:30 am Monday.

The printer and workstation queues were actually fine all along; the problem was to do with the printer's network connection.

We've seen tens of thousands of break-in attempts on servers in a number of departments. One of those attempts resulted in a research group's server (not in Math & Stats) being compromised and removed from the network by UTS when they discovered it to be the source of nasty behaviour.

The compromised system was not attacked via a security hole or subtle social engineering: the compromised account had a password simple enough for the cracking program to guess it.

Please make sure that your mathserv password is good. Good means:

1. more than one word
2. at least one of those words is not in the dictionary
3. you have one or more numbers or symbols in your password
4. your password has nothing to do with your name

Mathserv was down for ca. fifteen minutes this afternoon; it's back up as of 3:10 pm with no apparent loss of data.

Physical Plant has announced that the power will be shut off for ca. ten seconds in Hamilton Hall at 6:00 am on Wednesday, October 19th.

I will schedule an automatic shutdown of the mspime workstations as well other RHPCS-administered unix (incl. OS X) machines. Please logout before you leave on Tuesday.

If you adminster your own system (this means all Windows users as well as some Macintosh and unix users), I highly recommend turning your computer off before you leave on Tuesday.

The servers will not be affected directly since they are on a UPS, but they will not be accessible while the power is out because the network will not work without electricity.