IT Status

The license for mathematica on sphere has been updated and the program is functioning normally again.

There is a scheduled power outage for the Earth Sciences building on Sunday May 27, 2012 from 9:30am until 2:30pm.  We will be shutting down the various departmental machines over there starting on Friday evening.  This means that the DHCP server will be down and people may have difficulty with network access until the server is back up.  Please ensure that any personal machines are protected as well.  The departmental machines should be back up on Monday morning (perhaps even on Sunday).

Symantec’s pcAnywhere software (which runs under Windows, and which is not installed on departmental computers by default) has been compromised and users of that software should disable it until they produce a fix for it.  Please see

http://www.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/pcAnywhere%20Security%20Recommendations%20WP_01_23_Final.pdf

for more information.

The departmental servers all appear to be working fine after the updates.

The software updates are finished now, except that the mail server will take perhaps 15-30 more minutes.

“sage” is now available on sphere for testing.  Please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu if you have any difficulties with it.

From http://www.sagemath.org/: Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface.

The UofT I+TS Security Group has asked that people be reminded that UofT (and also the Department of Mathematics) will never ask for someone to send a password via email (unless that email is well encrypted, and currently most people still do not use that).  They have a warning page for avoiding email and phishing fraud.

Also, the main UTORweblogin page (to access the Portal for Blackboard, for example and UofT’s webmail) has a large box with an anti-phishing warning to remind people to not type passwords into the wrong web pages.

The departmental servers all appear to be working fine after the updates.  The mail and web servers were back before 4:30pm, but coxeter took slightly longer (less than 5 minutes) due to the large number of updates.

Please see the message about the (complete, non-backed-up) removal of the 215 Huron servers and files on 2011aug03.

Here is the list of accounts at 215 Huron which are not also coxeter accounts:

akelbert artur dukes gaidash georg jay jrobert kiefte libland magnusa mashas mbrav miriam mrogers salafiac solaris sylvain yangchao yfeler zavosh

All the files belonging to those accounts will be removed, without backups, very soon.  See the posting titled “Removing old servers and computer files from 215 Huron on 2011aug03” for more information.