What's New at the ACCC

You'd have to be living in a cave not to be reminded daily about Year 2000 computer problems, but here's another reminder, specifically about what you need to do to ensure that UIC is ready for the Year 2000.

As a member of the UIC community, you are responsible for:

• The hardware, operating systems, and commercial software on your personal and departmental computers, LANs, and workstations, including UNIX workstations and Apple Macintosh personal computers

 
• All the commercial software that you use, including commercial statistical, spreadsheet, database, calendar, and scheduling software. For the most part, you can leave commercial software packages on public systems such as the ACCC's borg, tigger, icarus, and Server Services to the people taking care of these systems. But not software that you asked to be installed on those systems. We're both responsible for that software; its a good idea for you to check on it yourself.

 
• Your handwritten programs and macros, on all systems, including PCs and Macs, UNIX workstations, and host systems such as the ACCC's borg, tigger, and icarus.

 
• Your personal, research, and administrative data and databases, on all systems, both data you obtain yourself and data that you get from other sources, including colleagues and commercial sources.

 
• Embedded systems, including most scientific and medical instrumentation.

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[Note added June, 2002: We've now retired the Grim Reaper altogether; see Email Space Limits for ACCC Servers for more information. - Ed.]

We've rethought our "Grim Reaper" email quota system and we've come up with new email quota rules, which we'll be using on mailserv, icarus, and tigger.

The old Grim Reaper rules were based on the age and total size of mail items stored in your UNIX inbox. The Reaper deleted messages from your inbox that exceeded an age limit (8 weeks). It also moved the oldest messages in an inbox to system scratch space when the total size of the inbox exceeded a size limit (2 MB on icarus, 4 MB on tigger), and sent a note explaining how to get them back.

In the new scheme, there are "soft" and "hard" size quotas. You will begin receiving email warning messages when the size of your inbox (on tigger or icarus) or the size of your inbox plus all other IMAP mailboxes (on mailserv; IMAP mailboxes are the ones you keep on the server) approaches and exceeds your soft quota.

Instead of "reaping," in the new Reaper will "bounce" new incoming messages, returning them to their sender, under two conditions:

(1) After you've been over your soft quota for seven days.

(2) Immediately after you go over your hard quota.

These limits are more generous than our old Grim Reaper rules, and should be easier to live with as well.

Note: The Grim Reaper quotas never apply to mail that you move into mailboxes on your personal computer, including mail in your Eudora Inbox when you use POP and all mailboxes you keep on your personal computer, even when you use IMAP. See the articles on IMAP in the October/November/January 1998 issue of the A3C Connection.
 

Keeping the Reaper Away (Temporarily) Are you going on vacation or expecting a large influx of email for another (acceptable) reason? We can keep the Grim Reaper away while while you're gone (and for a few days beyond). Send the dates you'll be gone or the reason that you'll go over the Reaper's limits to systems@uic.edu. (If you're going on vacation, we ask that you suspend your subscriptions to active LISTSERV email discussion lists before you leave. You probably will not want to read all the old mail in an active LISTSERV list when you come back anyway.)

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Good news: we've applied Y2K patches to the operating systems on both borg and tigger, and they're both certified as Y2K compliant. That's only the operating systems, though we're making headway on their application software packages as well. And that's only for now; there's sure to be more problems found and fixed before its all over. (We're still working on icarus.)

We've also installed a number of new packages on "the new borg," including the much awaited (and Y2K-compliant) Gaussian 98. For more info, see the borg home page: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/hardware/borg/

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As we've previously announced, the ACCC's UICVM mainframe is scheduled to be decommissioned by December 31, 1999. And there's still no need to panic, but we must all get moving. If you're not sure what you should do, visit the ACCC VM Omega Web page.

That's the source for all CMS retirement information, including the schedule and online materials for the CMS migration seminars, suggested replacements for the most-used CMS software, and an FAQ. Like the CMS retirement process itself, the VM Omega page is a work in progress; please check it regularly for updated information.

The First Step: Email

Because the move to mailserv will be easiest for people who already read their CMS email on their personal computers, we started with them. We have already created mailserv accounts for everyone who had been using the CMS POP server.

If you're one of these people and if email is the only thing you use CMS for, congratulations, you're done! Your mailserv account and password will provide access to the other public ACCC facilities, including the ACCC dialin lines and personal computer labs, so you won't even need to open an account on tigger or icarus.

Our next step will be to create mailserv accounts for the rest of the people doing email on CMS, those using the CMS mail, note, and rdrlist commands. These people will have to choose a new way to manage their EMail; they might choose to do it on their personal computer, using Eudora or WebMail, or to open an ACCC UNIX account and do it from tigger or icarus using Pine.
 

mailserv.uic.edu is not available for public use yet.  For now, accounts on mailserv.uic.edu are limited to people migrating from CMS; we hope to make it more widely available by the fall.

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We know that many of you -- even many who have already moved away from CMS -- have files in the CMS archives. CMS's VM Archive system was not designed to handle thousands of people recalling hundreds of files each; we know this from first-hand experience. So please don't do this yourself. We're working on a process that will allow us recall all the VMArchive files belonging to each CMS account and write them on a CD-ROM that we'll send to the account's owner.

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The UIC Class Roster Request form is on the Web; a link to it is on the UIC home page ( http://www.uic.edu/ ), in the Classroom section. The Roster Request Web form replaces the CMS graderun roster utility, and, we modestly submit, its better than ever, giving you several options for the roster's format, including downloading in a form suitable for importing into a database or spreadsheet. Classes are identified by academic session and course call number. The rosters are built from information received from the Office of Admissions and Records; the data used is updated regularly, at least once a week.

Only faculty may use the form, and only after logging in with Bluestem and accepting the Office of Admissions and Records' UIC Student Records Policy. Quite reasonably, that policy limits the use of student records to tasks of "legitimate educational interest, such as appropriate administrative, teaching, research, advising, or student service functions."

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If you didn't hear the flap about the Melissa MS Word and Outlook virus that overran the Internet in March, then you're really living in a cave! We at UIC got off pretty easy, mostly because there aren't many people here who use MS Outlook for email. We won't be so lucky the next time.

There's a lesson that we all have to learn from Melissa:

Never open any file until after you scan it with current anti-virus software, regardless of how you get the file, whether you receive it by email, on a floppy, on a CD, or by any other means, and regardless of who you get it from, even if it's someone you know and trust.

The ACCC distributes Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus, for free, and anyone at UIC can use it, on any of their machines. We can't guarantee that you'll be safe if you use it, but we do guarantee that you'd be crazy not to! Dr. Solomon is on the Web at: %http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/software/antivirus/

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