ITS @ IWU

Roy Bailey and Linda Biehl, working with the Physical Plant have the first phase of the Security Camera Project operational.  The NICE system was selected to provide security camera support in residence halls and campus buildings.  Several parking lots will be addes to the system as well.

The full functionality of the e-mail system was restored last evening.  No e-mail was lost during the software glitch that caused the disruption in e-mail service that began on Thursday afternoon. E-mail that was sent from campus was not affected.  Pat Riehecky and the Network Service group worked with Sun Microsystems to determine that our system hit known Bug 6489866.  The bug makes the e-mail system think it is being hit with a denial of service attack.  There is not a fix for the bug from Sun, but we now have a work around in case the bug is encountered in the future.

Network Services has completed the Network Upgrade Project.  The Internet bandwidth available to the Campus was doubled from 45MBs (DS3) to 90MBs in December.  Along with the additional bandwidth, a new bandwidth sharing device call a NetEqualizer replaced the existing Packeteer.  The NetEqualizer uses bandwidth sharing fairness rules based on network usage to share bandwidth and balance the available bandwidth between all users.  The project made a dramatic improvement to Internet access for the campus community.

The content management system is back up and ready to use. We regret to inform you that Sungard was unable to complete the upgrade to the latest LCMS version. Work will continue on the project so that new features and Macintosh support become available in the near future.

The system is restored back to the original version. We apologize for the inconvenience and will keep you informed on the LCMS upgrade project status.

The recently acquired HP Blade Server is in production thanks to the efforts of the Network Services Team.  Several services including SMTP, DNS, and Lists were moved to the blade server.  Moving these services to the blade allowed the Network Services Team to decommission five old computers that have been supporting these services.  The efforts of the Network Services Team have introduced a new class of computing to IWU with improved reliability and energy efficient blade server technology.

Thanks also goes out to the Desktop Services and Help Desk Staff who helped people on campus transition to the new services.

There was a problem with receiving mail this morning.  The Red Condor spam firewall did not function correctly after an automatic patch was applied during the early morning hours.  The patch kept e-mail from being distributed.  Any mail that was sent from @iwu.edu was not affected.

Red Condor is responsible for maintaining the spam firewall.  Pat Riechecky worked with Red Condor to restore e-mail service.  Thanks Pat!

On Wednesday, October 8th, Information Technology and The Ames Library will be moving the campus over to a new proxy server.  This new server enables us to provide easier and more seamless access to our restricted campus web pages and library licensed resources for our off-campus users.

Once we are live on the new system, you will no longer be required to enter proxy server information into your web browser.  Instead, when you click on a link that requires authentication you will be prompted to enter your NetID and password (same login/password that you use for my.iwu.edu).  After you have authenticated, you will be able to access any restricted campus web pages or library licensed resources for the duration of your browser session.

If you have a browser on your home computer or laptop configured to access online resources at the Ames Library, or Intranet web pages via the IWU Proxy server, please remove the proxy settings.  Instructions to remove the proxy information can be found at http://www.iwu.edu/IT/help/helpdesk/proxy.shtml.  Please contact the Information Technology Helpdesk at 309-556-3900 or online at http://help.iwu.edu/ if you have any questions.

Thanks,
IT and Ames Library Staff

IT continues to restore services that were handled by the Titan server that crashed last Wednesday, September 3rd. Status reports on some services are listed below:

**IWU’s OFFICIAL WEB SITE has been moved from the server named Titan to the
server named Sun. Links for pages on the official University Web Site were available on September 5th. If you notice any problems with the website, please report them by logging a call at help.iwu.edu or telephone 556-3900.

**INDIVIDUAL EMAIL ACCOUNTS that were on the server named Titan have been moved to server space called “Mail.” Email messages that were sent to accounts on Titan have been to delivered to @iwu accounts. IT staff are happy to work with individuals to resolve any remaining access issues for their email. If you need assistance, please log a call at help.iwu.edu or telephone 556-3900.

**DEPARTMENTAL/ORGANIZATIONAL EMAIL ACCOUNTS on the server named Titan have been moved to the server space called orgmail. IT staff are assisting departments and organizations in adjusting their mail settings (in Thunderbird and Eudora) to send and receive mail using these accounts. If you need assistance, please log a call at help.iwu.edu or telephone 556-3900.

**INDIVIDUAL WEB PAGES that were on the server named Titan, have been moved to individual server space on the server Sun. Staff in IT will be glad to assist you in accessing these pages and moving them to a Public HTML folder where they will again be viewable. For assistance, please log a call at help.iwu.edu or telephone 556-3900.

** DEPARTMENTAL/ORGANIZATIONAL WEB PAGES – All Departmental and Organizational web pages that were on the server named Titan are active.  If you are experiencing problems with a Departmental or Organizational web page please log a call at help.iwu.edu or telephone 556-3900.

**LUMINIS CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM - Titan was our content management system target server for all published content. Even though we restored the University website very quickly, users of the system were not able to publish any new files until a new target server could be configured. The work is now complete, and all users may publish changes and new pages to the University website.

A catastrophic server failure occurred on the afternoon of September 3, that supports the main IWU website, organizational websites, some faculty e-mail, retiree e-mail accounts, and dial-up services.

On-site service arrived around 7:00pm and worked through the night with Chris Rutledge and Pat Riehecky to repair the server and restore services.   It was determined that a better approach to resolve the problem is to restore the services on a new server rather than continuing to repair the failed server.  The Network Team will work throughout the day to restore services as quickly as possible.

If you have any questions please call the IT Help Desk at #309-566-3900.