Category: GAC IT

Most of you at GAC have probably noticed that this week email has gotten particularly slow. There appears to be a few reasons for this. The biggest reason is that people are collecting more and more email in their inboxes these days. If you feel that your email performance is slow, the best thing you…

In an effort to help protect our self from joe jobs, spam, viruses, etc. we have begun publishing SPF TXT records in our DNS for gac.edu and gustavus.edu. If you want to know more about SPF, take a look at spf.pobox.com

It seems like almost every Windows computer on campus is infected these days. Ok, well maybe not every one, but some times it sure feels like it. Anyway one of the things I am seeing a lot these days is macines trying to connect to irc servers and listening for commands. I think that is…

It appears as though some machine(s) on campus is trying to take out an IRCd server. There are literally thousands of spoofed TCP SYN packets heading for a specific machine each second. The packets are pretending to be coming from what appears to be random IP addresses not on our network. So tracing this back…

Due to an unusual set of circumstances, we had to turn off email for about an hour today. A combination of a new email virus/worm, disk space, and email lists, and mail scanning, all combined with some bad luck and we ended up allowing almost everyone on campus to recieve the latest Windows email virus/worm…

Since there is such a high volume of the MyDoom infected email attachments flying around these days and some unlucky people have been getting hundreds of the email messages saying that we removed the attachment, we have now stopped sending those notifications for MyDoom. So if you are sent an email that is infected with…

This morning during a regular check of the backup generator, power was lost in our machine room. For the most part this meant everything was down for about 20 minutes starting near 8:30am. Everything should have been up and running as normal by 9:00am.

As a part of testing what we can do with wireless network access, we have placed 2 wireless access points on the 1st floor of Olin. These 2 access points appear to provide the first floor with fairly good coverage. This includes the class room on the 1st floor, the lobby, and the lab. I…

From Jeff’s email: “Around 11:15-11:30 something happened that crippled the res-hall network to the point of unusability. We made a change to revert something to the way it was around four months ago and that seems to have solved the problem. Our two outstanding questions are, did that fix it? and if so, Why was…

As everyone should know by now, another email virus is going around. As far as we can tell, nobody on campus has been infected yet. Our mailserver is deleting a lot of attachments that are infected with this virus and anything that made it through should also be caught by the latest virus definitions. However…