News - Sep 2001

Sep 29 2001 - Mailserv will be down on Saturday, September 29 for system maintenance. The downtime is scheduled for 7pm until midnight, but we hope that it will take less time than that.

Sep 27 2001 - Icarus, the student email and Web server, will be down from 8pm Thurs 9/27 (tonight) until 5am for disk reconfiguration. Email will be unavailable during that time. We hope the work will help us eliminate or further isolate the I/O bus problems that have been causing recent outages.

Sep 26 2001 - Icarus is having trouble, for the second time today, at 1:30.

We were going to replace the disk controllers tonight, but given the current situation, we will take the extra 20-30 minutes and replace them now. So it will be done a bit longer than a normal reboot.

The new disk controllers may fix the problem. If not, replacing them is a good step in the direction of isolating the problem.

The good news is that it's getting worse. That will make it easier to and faster to diagnose the details.

Bob Goldstein

Sep 25 2001 - Icarus has been experiencing intermittant SCSI bus problems; the problems seems to manifest themselves mostly at peak times, and have caused system crashes as well as slowdowns. This will affect all services on icarus, notably mail (even when you use WebMail to contact icarus) and Meeting Maker.

If things would flat out break, it would be much easier to fix. With an intermittant problem, we have to keep swaping parts and rearranging the configurations, and then just wait and see if things get better. Very time consuming and frustrating, for us as well as you.

You can check the UpReport page, http://www.accc.uic.edu/upreport for a near-real time list of what is up and what is not. And we will continue making changes until we can isolate the problem and fix it. It is a very high priority.

Bob Goldstein
Assistant Director, ACCC

Sep 19 2001 - Icarus will be down at 8pm for several hours Wed, to repair some disk problems.

Sep 18 2001 - There is a new worm infecting IIS machines even if you have put in the patches. If you don't need to run your webservers, please shut them off. Thanks Darlene Senior Operator Computer Center University of Illinois at Chicago

Sep 18 2001 - There is a new worm affecting both the network and IIS machines around campus. Affected machines are being filtered. The worm is spread in two ways: 1) Via an attachment called README.EXE received via email. We are now filtering email that contains this attachment. If you have already recceived it, DO NOT EXECUTE it. 2) A machine that is already infected will also try to spread this to IIS servers on the internet. We do not have detailed information on how to patch your machine yet. This worm appears to be attacking known problems. If you are running IIS, please install all patches Microsoft has available immediately. For more information: http://www.cert.org/current/current_activity.html#port80 http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/18/151203.shtml Ed Zawacki -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edward Zawacki Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Computer Security Officer ACCC (M/C 135) edz@uic.edu 1940 W Taylor (312) 996-0658 Chicago, IL 60612-7352