Core Services

Category: GAC IT

  • Network Upgrades

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    doachs

    Over the past couple of weeks, we have made some improvements to the campus computer network. The most noticeable of these will be for the residents of Pittman. Four more Wi-Fi access points were installed to help improve the wireless coverage in that dorm. Less noticeable changes were made to the wired network in Complex.…

  • Home directory access this morning

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    doachs

    At about 4:00am this morning our NFS server crashed. At about 6:30am we temporarily restored access to home directories with our backup system until the primary system could be rebooted at 7:10am. Some email was delayed during this time and is being delivered now. All systems were back up and running by 7:30am.

  • Comcast Blocked Gustavus Email

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    doachs

    Here is a little story about why spam sucks, and why computer security is important. Over the weekend I received and email because one of our users got an error message when trying to send an email to a family member. That family member had a comcast.net email address. The error message from Comcast’s mailserver…

  • 2 New Spam Checkers

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    doachs

    Since it does not look like spam is going away any time soon and the amount of spam being sent to Gustavus addresses is increasing every day, we needed to add more spam checking servers. Checking as much email as we get for spam is a very big task. As a result we now have…

  • Internet Slowness (fixed)

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    doachs

    You may have noticed that some websites and things such as AOL IM have been slow or not functioning well today. We believe that the cause of the problem was a backhoe incident near Valley Fair ( Just south of the Twin Cities). Well, maybe not excatly a backhoe, but a fiber optic cable was…

  • Home Directory Access Last Night

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    doachs

    Our NFS server crashed last night at about 12:20am. As a result home directories were not available until our backup NFS server was in place at about 6:30am. At about 7:40am the main NFS server was back in service.

  • Network Infrastructure Upgrades

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    doachs

    Over the past couple of days we have increased the local network bandwidth available to some of the buildings on campus. By rearranging some of our network hardware and making use of previously dormant fiber links, we have made a few upgrades. Prairie View used to have a 100Mbit connection to the campus network which…

  • Spam Filtering Update

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    doachs

    This week we have upgraded the spam filtering software on our email servers from SpamAssassin 3.1.3 to SpamAssassin 3.1.6. We also added the OpenProtect SpamAssassin channel to our updated rules. This gives us the SARE rules which should help us catch more of the image based stock spams people see these days. If you are…

  • 2005 Graduates

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    doachs

    This year we are doing a few extra things for our recent alumni. Since it has been well over 1 year since the class of 2005 graduated, it was time to deactivate those accounts and free up the resources they were using. One new service we are offering this year is the ability to keep…

  • Jabber Server Upgrade

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    doachs

    Yesterday I upgraded our Jabber server from Wildfire 3.0 to Wildfire 3.1.0 beta. With the new beta comes the ability to install the IM Gateway plugin. This plugin allows you to use our jabber server to contact users on AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, and Yahoo networks. Since this is a beta, there are some bugs…