News - May 2003

May 31 2003 - We experienced problems with the incoming "uic.edu" mail servers beginning Friday night at approximately 8pm and continuing on and off until Saturday at 4pm. The problem caused these servers to sporadically reject many (but not all) incoming messages with destination addresses of the form: netid@uic.edu .

You may be hearing complaints about this from your correspondents who received such notices. They will have received a "rejection notice" from UIC with a message similar to these:

128.248.155.124 does not like recipient
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
Giving up on 128.248.155.124.

or

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
netid@uic.edu
(reason: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown

If you were expecting an important message during either period, please ask the senders to re-transmit such messages to you.

The initial cause of the problem appears to have been a hardware failure, but the problem was compounded when reserve servers took over the load with an incorrect configuration. A fail-safe mechanism, for lack of a better word, "failed". We are reviewing the events and will take actions to prevent a recurrence in the future.

We regret inconveniences and problems caused by this problem.

May 30 2003 - Argo will be down on Friday (5/30) starting at 9:30 AM. Reason: hardware maintenance.

May 24 2003 - Icarus will be down from 10am to 6pm on 05/24/2003 to complete the filesystem maintainance from last week, and to install current OS patches.

May 22 2003 - CRIME ALERT

Police are investigating the armed robbery of two people, one of them a UIC student, in the 1300 block of West Flournoy at 11 p.m. Wednesday, May 21. The victims told police they were walking on Flournoy when they were approached by two men, one of whom pointed a pistol at them and demanded money. One of the victims surrendered a small amount of cash and the offenders fled eastbound on foot. Police searched the area but did not locate the offenders. Neither victim was injured.

Police describe one of the offenders as a male black, 20-25 years old, 6 feet tall, approximately 190 pounds, wearing a black baseball cap, black hooded sweatshirt with a red stripe, and blue jeans. The other offender was described as a male black, 20-25 years old, 5-9, 165 pounds, wearing a black shirt and pants.

Anyone with information is asked to call UIC Police at (312) 996-2830 or Chicago Police Area 4 detectives at (312) 746-8253. The emergency number for the UIC Police is (312) 996-HELP (4357).

May 19 2003 - Blackboard is being upgraded to version 6, and moving to a new machine. This major move requires 2-3 days downtime. The service will be available no later than Thursday morning.

In the future, everyone will have to log in at blackboard.uic.edu (the old courseinfo.uic.edu URL is no longer supported). Direct URLs to a specific course site are no longer possible.

During the downtime, a few select courses that continue to be active will be available at the special URL blackboard55.uic.edu (by arrangement only).

May 17 2003 - Icarus will be down for more filesystem maintainance from 10am to 4pm on Saturday May 17. Icarus should be back up by 4pm.

May 15 2003 - Tigger will be down tonight (early Thursday morning) from 12:01am until 1:30 am for hardware repairs.

May 10 2003 - Icarus will be down for brief filesystem maintenance starting at 10am tomorrow, Saturday May 10th. Icarus should be up again before noon.