News - Jun 2003

Jun 28 2003 - N O T I C E

Tigger will be down from 11:00am to 3:00pm Saturday June 28 to install software updates.

Jun 24 2003 - A massive influx of SPAM on Saturday caused some "maximum process" limits to be reached on both our DNS (bind/named) servers and our incoming "uic.edu" (sendmail) servers. After our first investigation on Saturday, we concluded that incoming mail had been delayed but not rejected outright.

Today, after scanning logs a second time, we discovered that a presumably small number of email messages were indeed rejected back to the sender with a message like this:

    554 mailin-1.priv.cc.uic.edu ESMTP not accepting messages

We have significantly raised the trouble-causing limits on the Sendmail and DNS servers to hopefully prevent this from occurring again.

Jun 12 2003 - We had an accident Thurs afternoon that caused mail delivery, bluestem, and a few other services to break temporarily. No mail was lost, but it queued up while we fixed the problem, and should all be delivered by now.

Jun 09 2003 - The Unix password changing command passwd has been disabled on the ACCC's general-purpose Unix servers tigger and icarus.

If you try to use them, you will be told to go to the ACCC Web password utility: http://passwords.accc.uic.edu

There are new, stronger password criteria for passwords as well now; they're explained on the Web page.

Jun 03 2003 - FYI Electrical workers in the BGRC computer room unintentionally disturbed a power connection, causing one of several banks of disk drives to power down. This was actually a worse scenario than having the entire system fail because long, detailed file system integrity checks had to be run instead of the usually quick commit/rollback log recovery. These checks consumed most of the 2.5 hours of downtime.