Category: GAC IT

The performance of our email server has been anything but great the past few weeks. To help speed things up we ordered some nice new 15000 RPM disks a few weeks ago. Well, we finally got them and were able to install them today. Initial results look promising. Hopefully email performance will be great from…

Last week it appears that AOL put us on their blacklist. That means that any email sent from Gustavus via our default mail server was being rejected by AOL. The reason they are rejecting us is because a number of student machines have been sending out spam. Most likely these machines were infected with one…

Sunday evening something happened in Norelius that pretty much brought down the entire network. We are not sure exactly what it was. It was still causing problems around 7:30am this morning but by 8:00am whatever was causing the problem has disappeared.

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.