Core Services » Dan Oachs

Explanation for last nights internet outage

Dan Oachs — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:07:44 +0000

Last night our ISP ( Hickorytech ) needed to relocate the fiber that our internet connection travels on due to road construction. We were notified last week that there would be a “loss of service for up to one hour during the window” with the window being from 12:00am until 6:00am, October 13th. Being a bit preoccupied with Nobel Conference and Homecoming events last week I didn’t notify the community about this ahead of time like I should have.

It turns out that our internet connection went down at about 12:15am and didn’t come back up until 6:44am. Considerably longer than the “loss of service for up to one hour during the window” our ISP warned us about.

Anyway, everything is back up and running now and the next time we are notified of an upcoming outage, no matter how small, I will be sure to make more announcements about it ahead of time.

Sorry for the inconvenience I am sure this caused last night.

Panoramic Photos of Gustavus

Dan Oachs — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:12:29 +0000

Have you ever wondered what the view is like from the roof of Olin Hall? Or maybe search for faces in the crowd of the 2009 Nobel Conference?

We have uploaded those zoomable panoramas as well as others such as the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library and a beautiful view of the Eckman Mall on a nice sunny fall afternoon.

To see all of those panoramas and more, visit the Gustavus GigaPan website.

UPDATE: I have uploaded a new beautiful GigaPan looking up the hill at Old Main.

2009 Nobel Conference Time Lapse

Dan Oachs — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:09:25 +0000

Well, it is the beginning of October here at Gustavus Adophus College and that means it is Nobel Conference time. Just like last year, we took images of the entire conference from one of our webcams and combined them into a single time lapse video.

Watch the video.

For those who are interested, I have a few other versions of the video. Some are much higher quality than the link above.

How to watch the Nobel Conferece

Dan Oachs — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:56:25 +0000

There are many ways to watch this years Nobel Conference on your computer.

If you are on campus and have a wired network connection you can view this stream or try going to http://tv.gac.edu/.

If you are on campus and have a TV connected to cable, you can watch the Nobel Conference on channel 7.

Finally, if you are not on campus or only have a wireless connection, you can find a link to watch live on the Nobel Conference website.

Commencement 2009 Time-lapse

Dan Oachs — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:42:27 +0000

Commencement 2009

As per the tradition started a few years ago by Matt Dobosenski, this years Commencement ceremony held on Sunday, May 31st 2009 was captured by time-lapse.

If your computer can handle it, take a look at our highest quality video stream.

If that version is too much for your computer to handle, there is a half sized version available as well.

Finally, if you wish, you can download all of the available video files.

commencement2009-1280×1024.mp4
commencement2009-half-size.mp4
commencement2009-720p.mp4
commencement2009-widescreen-half-size.mp4
commencement2009-iphone.m4v

Another round of phishing email

Dan Oachs — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:31:32 +0000

This morning many of our users woke up to find their inbox had been invaded by a number of email messages asking them to verify their gustavus.edu email account.

This is just a quick reminder to say that no one associated with Gustavus sent that message. An easy test to do is to read the message and if it asks you for your password, it is a phishing email and not from us. Please don’t reply to it.

Gustavus accounts are sent hundreds of phishing attempts every week. The one being seen by a large number of our users this morning is just one example of what is being sent every day.

As always, if you have any questions, please call the Technology Helpline at x6111.

Blocking External DNS Servers

Dan Oachs — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:58:53 +0000

In the past few months we have had a number of infected computers on our network which were using DNS servers other than our own and were most likely malicious. Thus if those computers tried to go to a site like paypal.com they could have ended up at an evil version of paypal.com that was there to steal login information.

Other infected computers have tried to pass along bad DNS servers to others on the network and get them to use the malicious DNS servers as well. This is what was causing network issues in Pittman and Sohre last night.

To help us combat this we have decided to block access to DNS servers that are not on our campus. The OpenDNS servers are an exception to this rule. Also, the ssh server is allowed to use any DNS server so if you need to use nslookup or dig to query external DNS servers, you can do it from there.

Unless you know something about DNS and have specifically configured your computer to not use the Gustavus DNS servers, you should not have to change anything due to this.

New anti phishing tool now in use

Dan Oachs — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:46:33 +0000

Earlier this week we started using a new tool to fight against phishing email. A group of higher ed email administrators has put together a list of email addresses used for phishing. As new addresses are discovered, they are added to the list. We have modified our email server to quarantine any email sent to a Gustavus account that comes from or has a reply-to containing any of the email addresses on that list.

Our hope is that this will significantly cut down on the number of phishing messages reaching users mailboxes. If you do get a phishing email in your inbox, please forward it to noc@gac.edu so we can get the address added to our list. That way all the others can benefit from it as well.

You can visit the anti phishing email reply website for more information.

Gustavus, now with 50% more bandwidth

Dan Oachs — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:41:49 +0000

Earlier this afternoon we upgraded the internet connection for the campus from our previous 100Mbit/s to the new 150Mbit/s.

Can’t login to Google Calendar?

Dan Oachs — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:54:09 +0000

When you get the error page, try telling your browser to reload the page.

Many users are getting the following error this morning when they try to login to Google Calendar.

This service cannot be accessed because your login credentials are not yet valid

If you see that error message, just tell your browser to reload the page ( F5 on windows, command R on a mac ) and you should see your calendar load.

So far we don’t know the cause of the error but we suspect it is something on Google’s end and they will hopefully fix it soon.