July 2011 Archives
July 28, 2011
"Official Message" not at all Official
Another webmail-phishing message hit a number of addresses on the Math & Stats mail server this morning, and this one is much better crafted than is usual: it has specific, correct information and is not filled with tell-tale grammatical solecisms.
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:36:01 -0300 (GMT-03:00)
From: math <webmasterr@math.mcmaster.ca>
Subject: Official Message
We have upgraded our server to new secured version.This is to enable your webmail account take a new look with new functions and help protect against spam e-mails. You are require to upgrade your account to new secured version by clicking here or on the secure link below
https:/secure.math.mcmaster.ca
Copyright © 2011 Department of Mathematics & Statistics @ McMaster University. All Rights Reserved.
Needless to say, this is not from me or anyone else in RHPCS. Aside from the ring of phishiness to the message, there are two things that give this away as a phishing attempt:
- the message does not have my name or the name of another RHPCS staff member in it
- if you hover of the URL in the message (or view the raw text of the message), you will see that the link goes to another server altogether.
Continue reading "Official Message" not at all Official.
July 22, 2011
Intermittent Internet Outages Late Friday Night
UTS has announced that ORION will be do some network maintenance between 10 pm today and 6 am Saturday; we may see some intermittent problems (both incoming and outgoing).
Continue reading Intermittent Internet Outages Late Friday Night.
July 21, 2011
OS X Lion - Things to Note Before You Upgrade
OS X Lion - version 10.7 - is now available for $29.99 via the App Store. The upgrade happens over the network, so you don't need any media. The entire process took me about 1.5 hours from a campus network connection and only about 10G of extra disk space was required in the end.
Some things to note about Lion before you decide to upgrade ...
- fink and all fink-installed apps (found under /sw) will need to be recompiled
- the new Mail app is not working with the mathmail.mcamster.ca IMAP server;
I haven't got this sorted out yet - you need to 1) make sure that your ms.mcmaster.ca password is shorter than thirteen characters; 2) either turn SSL off and back on or recreate your mathmail account settings; details here. (updated 2011/0802)
- it works with Univmail and Gmail just fine, though
- XCode (gcc et al.) is not included with the Lion download, but you can install it (for free) from the App Store.
- neither is Java included as part of the Lion installation, but it can be downloaded (for free) from Apple (though not from the App Store, oddly); see http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421.
the XQuartz build of X11 has some window-focussing issues; the stock OS X X11 appears to work better(it's been several years since that has been the case)- the XQuartz release of X11 of 2011/07/20 works perfectly well on Lion, though the stock version seems to work just fine, too. (updated 2011/07/27)
- autos does not follow certain NFS (e.g. /net/hal/share/macos) properly. Or rather, it follows the specs very strictly, and so certain types of exports which other autofs implementations (e.g. OS X 10.6, most linuxes) have no trouble with, just give errors. This may be tweakable.
A few other notes for those who upgrade ...
- MacTeX/TeXLive works just fine; if you were using teTeX via fink, you should take the opportunity to switch to MacTeX (the Mac bundle which contains TeXLive)
July 19, 2011
R Upgraded to 2.13.1
R has been upgraded to version 2.13.1 on the ms workstations and compute servers.
All previously requested packages for R and BioConductor should be available in this newest build; please let us know if you find any problems.
July 15, 2011
Campus VPN Service Down
We've contacted UTS and confirmed that the McMaster VPN service is down as of some time on Thursday.
