As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, February 22nd and Saturday, March 9th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Friday, 2/22/2019 between 5pm and 9pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Saturday, 3/9/2019 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

The Ecological Society of America is seeking your help to reach your graduate students particularly from underrepresented minority groups for a brief survey. Kindly forward the following information to them.

The Ecological Society of America’s SEEDS – Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability – program is planning to develop workshops for graduate students, with priority to ESA SEEDS alumni and alumni of other diversity programs for underrepresented minority communities. Our goal is to develop the support network during the first few years of their MS or PhD programs and to provide opportunities to deepen and enhance new professional and scientific skills. For the first workshop, we are looking to team up with the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). The mission of SESYNC is to bring together the science of the natural world with the science of human behavior and decision-making to find solutions to complex environmental problems.

We have created a short survey aimed at being able to gauge the interest on this type of activity and what kinds of future workshops we should be offering. The survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete and your input is very valuable to help us serve you better. Please complete the survey by February 15, 2019. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact us.

Thank you for your help!

Take the Survey

Jody Shipper, J.D., and Cherie Scricca, Ed.D. of Grand River Solutions, Inc., will return to UMBC on February 21, 22, and 28, and March 1, for meetings with Retriever Courage partners, as well as with campus groups that they and Retriever Courage partners have identified. 

Shipper and Scricca will hold a second information gathering session for the UMBC community on March 1, 12 - 1 p.m. in the Proscenium Theatre, Performing Arts and Humanities Building. 

The information gathering session will be similar in format to the session that took place on February 7. It will start with a brief introduction to the consultants and their work on campus. Then, participants will be invited to share ideas and concerns with the consultants in order to inform their work at UMBC. 

Thank you for your commitment to Retriever Courage and for the input and suggestions you are sharing to inform this work. Please help us spread the word about this upcoming session by sharing with your colleagues and friends.

Dear Members of the UMBC Community,

As we announced earlier this month, a procurement committee of faculty, staff, and students has selected consultants Jody Shipper, J.D., and Cherie Scricca, Ed.D. of Grand River Solutions, Inc.to help UMBC address how our community can better prevent and respond to sexual violence/misconduct. This marks an important next step in our Retriever Courage initiative, in addition to early action steps completed by Retriever Courage partners.

On February 7, Shipper and Scricca will be on the UMBC campus for the first time, to hold initial meetings with the Implementation Team and Title IX staff. In order to give the UMBC community the opportunity to share input,Shipper and Scricca will hold an information gathering session on February 7, from 4 to 5 p.m., in the Proscenium Theatre, Performing Arts and Humanities Building.

Shipper and Scricca will return to UMBC on February 21, 22, and 28, and March 1, for meetings with Retriever Courage partners, as well as with campus groups that they and Retriever Courage partners have identified. Shipper and Scricca will hold another information gathering session for the UMBC community during this time, and we will update the campus when details are confirmed.

For those who prefer not to share publicly or are unable to attend either information gathering session, you may use this anonymous Google form and your feedback will be shared with Shipper and Scricca.