• Joe Kirby, AVP DoIT
• Joel DeWyer, Associated Director, The Commons Administration
• Nate Czarnota, Associate Director, Registrar's Office

Thank you

Joe Kirby, AVP Business Systems Group of DoIT

kirby@umbc.edu

At 10pm tonight, Tuesday April 8th, there will be a 45min outage of the Cyrus mail system.  This outage is needed to patch a critical security vulnerability which has just been discovered.  In order to mitigate this vulnerability a security patch must be installed which requires a reboot of all mail servers.  The mail servers will be restarted one at a time which will minimize the disruption of mail services.  Users will only lose access to their mail for a short period of time during the reboot.  Incoming mail will be queued during the reboot and then delivered once the server has been restarted.  No mail will be lost during this process and no user side action is needed.  Anyone who has migrated to Google will not be impacted by this restart.  We apologize any inconvenience.

After Thursday, May 22, the My Documents folder on lab computers will be disabled for storing files. Instead, DoIT recommends using Box (box.umbc.edu) for storing all of your files.  Combined with a new local vs. network profile, disabling the My Documents folder is expected to decrease login times on lab computers.  

In terms of personal storage, Box provides anytime, anywhere access and is available from desktops, laptops and mobile devices. Of course, lab computers will still support personal USB flash or “thumb” drives, too. For more information on Box, please visit the “Help” menu at the bottom of the Box login page at box.umbc.edu.

After May 22 any stored files will no longer be accessible and any future files stored in My Documents will not be saved.  Any data stored in the My Documents folder prior to May 22, 2014, will be available for one year, but recovery will only be possible by submitting an RT ticket by visitinghttp://my.umbc.edu/help or contacting our Technology Support Center at x53838.

Update:

Given recent IT security threats generally, DoIT has decided to force the password change to May 23, 2014, the day after Undergraduate Commencement. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding. 

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In an effort to improve campus security and better protect user information, DoIT is requiring that everyone with a UMBC account must change his or her password by June 9, 2014, unless this has already been done this calendar year. This will apply to all myUMBC account holders -- students, faculty, staff and alumni. We know people hate changing their account passwords, but with the rise of emails targeting people to share their account and password, called phishing, we feel it is necessary for security.

As part of this effort, everyone will also be required to provide an alternate email address and create account security questions. Once in place, all users will then be able to reset their password through a self-service page. We have had these account security questions in place for the last two years for students and the program has been very successful in reducing the number of time-consuming, manual password resets performed by our Technolgy Support Center (TSC). We expect that by expanding self-service password resets to all account holders, everyone will benefit.

A notice will appear to all faculty and staff when they login on Wednesday, April 23, informing them they need to change their password and establish their security questions, if they have not done so already in 2014. While the final date for password changes is June 9th, DoIT especially recommends that faculty make this change before they leave for the summer. We will also be sending out regular reminders.

To create your own security questions, visit the following Frequently Asked Question (FAQ):

How do I create my security questions to reset a forgotten password?

If you have any questions or need help, please submit an RT Ticket or contact the TSC at 410.455.3838.

1. The WT2014 Bb server will be taken completely offline on Friday, 3/21.
2. WT2013 courses will be restored on the UMBC Bb production server. We encourage you to download a copy of your grade center, and any other content that you might need to your local machine. If instructors have students finishing incomplete grades, and students must have continuing access to their WT2014 course over spring break, the instructors should put in an RT ticket request prior to Thursday, March 20.

Thank you for your patience during this transition.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure will be conducting its quarterly patching of systems.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are several systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Monday March 17th, 9am to 1pm

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in  reduced myUMBC functionality

• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be down

• The new web hosting environment will be down (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)

• All HFS (user) servers will be down

• Student mySQL databases will be offline

Tuesday March 18th, 9am to 1pm

• RT will be down

• Userpages will be down

• Wiki will be down

• R25 will be down

• License5 will be down (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx)

• Student mySQL databases will be offline

• Perseus will be down

There will be no data loss during the outage and no user action is required prior to the downtime. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Technology Support Center at x53838.