News - Nov 2002

Nov 28 2001 - There has been a massive outbreak of the Nimda virus among the hospital winstations, and ACCC has had to take emergency actions that affect all machines on the hospital network, infected or not. This action is that no machine on the hospital's network can contact Web serverrs beyond the hospital itself.

We've taken this action to protect other machines and networks, both at UIC and elsewhere on the Internet from the infected hospital computers.

ITS is working to clean up the infections and prevent their reoccurance. Please contact them for status updates on the cleanup; the Help Desk phone number is (312) 413-7717.

Each machine infected with Nimda scans the network looking for Web servers to attack. This scanning is so intense that the network performance is significantly degraded for all machines, infected or not. Our normal procedure is to instruct our routers to not pass packets sent by infected machines. But in this case, the number of infected machines is too large for the routers to handle, so we have had to adopt the simpler rule of stopping all contact with Web servers.

Bob Goldstein, ACCC

Nov 15 2001 - The two mailserver machines (email0 and email1) will be down from 7:00 PM - 11:00 PM on Saturday night (November 17th) for hardware maintenance.

Nov 13 2001 - The ADSM downtime scheduled for Tuesday afternoon has been cancelled.

Nov 13 2001 - The ADSM backup server will be down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day on Tuesday November 13. This is the quietest period for this facility, which works hard all night backing up your data, spends its weekends backing itself up, and then sits around waiting for somebody to need to restore all day on weekdays. Depending on how quickly the preparation work goes, the downtime should last from about 11:00AM to about 1:00PM.

If your computer is in the midst of backing itself up when the server goes down, simply restart the backup when it is available again, and it will resume where it left off, due to the always-incremental architecture of the ADSM system. You may also experience difficulty registering new ADSM machines during that time.

This downtime is to install additional disk drives, so that we can expand the capacity of the server to hold the backups of the brand-new FaCT computers which are being delivered this week. This could not be done before, due to another vital service on this machine which was rather sticky and complicated to move off, and it could not be postponed since the existing catalog database and staging buffer disk spaces are very nearly full and we expect the new FaCT machines to add quite a bit of new backed-up data.

If you have a problem while it is down, such as an urgent need to restore a file, we will be most easily reachable through Network Operations, telephone 413-8080 extension 2.

Roger Deschner
ACCC Basic Systems Group
rogerd@uic.edu

Nov 04 2001 - Early this morning we discovered a piece of fiber that appears to have been accidentally cut on the East side of Campus. This cut is affecting buildings in the north section of the East Campus. We have finished recabling all the affected buildings and are currently working on the cabling at SEL. We hope to have this problem corrected later today.

Some of the buildings affected are Stevenson Hall, UH, Main Library, SEO, BSB, SSB and SRC. If anyone continues to have connectivity problems on Monday morning, please call 413-8080 and press 2 to speak with Network Operations.

Thank you
Darlene
Senior Operator Computer Center