Core Services

Author: doachs

  • Gustavus Webadvisor Server

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    doachs

    This afternoon the web services team has changed the links for Webadvisor on the Gustavus home page to point to our new webadvisor server. The new setup consists of two linux servers running apache and tomcat 5, running in a highly available mode such that if the primary server should fail, the secondary server will…

  • System Downtime

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    doachs

    This morning at about 8:00am, one of our servers (meow) had a kernel panic and died.  As a result some services had issues with switching over to our secondary NFS server.  Thus there were problems accessing home directories on some apple computers, viewing homepages on our homepages.gac.edu webserver and checking quotas. By 8:30am, the server…

  • Spamassassin Upgrade

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    doachs

    Yesterday afternoon I upgraded our version of Spamassassin from 3.1.0 to 3.1.1.  I also ran sa-update so that it would download any new or updated rules.  My hope is that this newer version will do a better job at catching the recent stock pumping spam we have seen lately where it is mostly a bunch…

  • Email issues

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    doachs

    For some reason over the weekend a bunch of IMAP and POP3 processes got stuck and made it such that those users could not modify their inbox.  I didn’t have a good way to figure out who those users were so I killed all IMAP connections.  Therefore this morning a bunch of people will probably…

  • Carefull out there if you are browsing with IE

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    doachs

    For anyone who is browsing the internet with Internet Explorer you should be aware that an exploit for a recent vulnerability is being seen on the net.  At this time there is no patch for this from Microsoft.  However if you turn off Active Scripting, you can prevent your browser from being exploited. Internet Storm…

  • More Wireless

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    doachs

    Quote from Joel Jackson … “We have added three more wireless access points to the network today. Locations: Schaefer 323 – This services the Communications Studies Dept. and Classrooms Schaefer 316 – The Student Lounge/Computer Lab on 3rd floor by the Music library. Courtyard Cafe – Jackson Center on south side of the Post Office.”

  • Unexpected Downtime

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    doachs

    At about 12:35pm today, both of our servers that provide home directory access and email access (woof and meow) decided to call it quits and kernel panic. Both were restarted by 12:55pm. Luckily downtime was not too great, but it is very troubling that they both died when they did. No word yet on what…

  • Status Update

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    doachs

    Wireless Updates: The big news this week has been wireless. Since the last update we have added wireless to Rundstrom and Norelius. From our stats, it looks like the students in Norelius are really making use of it. (110 devices in the past 24 hours) We also ordered another 60 access points due to arrive…

  • Email Delays

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    doachs

    Late yesterday afternoon we were hit with a particularly large batch of spam comming from computers spread all across the internet.  Then, due to a slight loophole in our mailservers configuration for blocking spam, the spam ended up in a loop taking up more resources that it otherwise would have.  The end result was that…

  • WINS Server Change

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    doachs

    Our old WINS server (phoebe.gac.edu) was just not doing the job right these days. In an attempt to improve windows networking on campus this morning we switched to a new WINS server (wins.gac.edu). Our new setup also includes a WINS proxy to help all of our subnets talk to the WINS server in as efficient…