News Bulletin Archive

Infrastructure Bulletin

Phone Numbers for UTSI
Posted: Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

The Knoxville campus can now 5 digit dial UTSI in Tullahoma. Please refer to http://www.utsi.edu/facilities/Quick_List.pdf for a list of names and 5 digit extension numbers for UTSI.

Systems and Applications Bulletin

Minor Changes to OIT\'s Antivirus Website
Posted: Monday, July 13th, 2009

There will be minor changes made to OIT's antivirus website, http://antivirus.utk.edu, over the next few days as we prepare for the upcoming change to the Network Registration (NetReg) process. As announced in an earlier OIT events notice, the antivirus client that is distributed during the NetReg process for faculty and staff will change from McAfee to Forefront beginning this Wednesday evening. If you have any questions, please contact the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Email Bulletin

Minor Change to the Exchange/Tmail System
Posted: Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Minor Change to the Knoxville Exchange/Tmail system

To enhance security, OIT will require that all Outlook clients connecting to the Knoxville Exchange/Tmail system be configured to use RPC over HTTPS beginning June 30th. Email clients configured to use IMAPS or POPS will not be affected by this change. 99% of the systems at UT will not be impacted by this change and IT is making a best effort to contact users who may be impacted.
This change will affect users only if they fall into one of the following two categories:

1. Users with Microsoft operating Users with Microsoft Windows 2000 or older will not be able to use the Outlook client to connect to their Exchange account since these Operating Systems do not support RPC over HTTPS . Users that have one of these older operating systems can access their Tmail account through OWA at https://tmail.utk.edu. If the computer will support a later version of Microsoft Windows, a user should consider upgrading. Operating system upgrades are available at no charge for institutionally owned computers under the Microsoft Campus Enterprise Agreement.

2. Users with Outlook clients OLDER than Outlook 2003 will not be able to use their client to connect to their Exchange account since these clients do not support RPC over HTTPS. Users can download Outlook 2003 at http://oit.utk.edu/exchange/setup/setup_clients.php or use OWA at https://tmail.utk.edu.

If you have questions about whether this will impact you or questions about this message, please contact the OIT HelpDesk at 865 974-9900.

Infrastructure Bulletin

Wireless Upgrade Project, Week of April 20th, 2009
Posted: Thursday, April 16th, 2009

As OIT continues the upgrade of the wireless network to 802.11n, we will be replacing wireless access points in the following buildings during the week of 4/20/09. These dates are tentative and will be used as a guide for the technicians. As the access points in your building are replaced, you may experience intermittent wireless connectivity. The outages should last no longer that 10 minutes per access point.

4/20 – Clarence Brown Theatre, Student Health Clinic, Creamery Food Safety
4/21 – Hoskins Library, Ferris Hall
4/22 – Perkins Hall
4/23 – Dunford Hall, Walters Life Science
4/24 – Austin Peay, Hesler Biology

As work is completed, updates to the schedule will be posted on the OIT Wireless website, http://wireless.utk.edu.

If you have any questions, please contact the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Systems and Applications Bulletin

Wireless outages schedule for March 23, 2009
Posted: Monday, March 23rd, 2009

Work on the wireless upgrade project continues in several buildings. OIT will be replacing the access points in the following locations on Monday, March 23rd (today). We apologize for the inconvenience and will do our best to minimize downtime.

2111 Terrace Ave - Environmental Health and Safety ( 1 AP )
907 Mountcastle – English Language ( 2 AP )
916 22nd Street – Environmental Health and Safety ( 1 AP )
White Ave – Child Development ( 2 AP )
908 21st Street – Art Dept. Annex ( 2 AP )
2000 Lake Ave – Office of Research and Info Tech ( 1 AP )
2110 Terrace Ave – Radiation Safety ( 1 AP )
909 Mountcastle – Pediatric Language Clinic ( 1 AP )
905 Mountcastle – Construction Industry Research ( 2 AP )

If you have any questions regarding this project, please contact the OIT HelpDesk.

Systems and Applications Bulletin

ldap.utk.edu certificate upgrade (revised)
Posted: Thursday, March 19th, 2009

As previously announced, the Thawte SSL certificate for ldap.utk.edu will expire on Thursday, March 26, 2009. We had intended to renew the certificate with a 3yr GlobalSign certificate. A number of customers have reported the time window for adequately evaluating the impact of this change on their applications as too narrow. Therefore we will not at this time switch to GlobalSign for the certificate.

On Monday, March 23, 2009, between 7am - 8am, we will renew the existing Thawte SSL certificate on ldap.utk.edu. We do not expect any downtime. We will drop LDAP servers out of the DNS round-robin one at a time and renew the certificate.

The LDAP replica brennan.usg.utk.edu will remain available for testing SSL connections using an LDAP server with the GlobalSign certificate installed, point your application to either:

ldaps://brennan.usg.utk.edu:636

- or -

LDAP host: brennan.usg.utk.edu
LDAP port: 636 (SSL)

Infrastructure Bulletin

Maintenance on the Wireless Network
Posted: Friday, March 6th, 2009

OIT will be performing maintenance on the wireless network the week of March 16th – 20th. Rolling outages will occur on the wireless network throughout the week. During this time, the outages may also affect some select wired network ports on campus. The outages may last up to 15 minutes in a given location. OIT will work as quickly as possible to keep downtime to a minimum. If you have any questions about the project, please contact the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Security Bulletin

ISO Scanning Server Down for Upgrades
Posted: Monday, November 24th, 2008

The ISO Scanning Server will be down for upgrades on Tuesday, November 25th. This means that the "Security Scans" website, and the SNAP scanning webservice will be unavailable on Tuesday. Notice will be sent out when it has returned to service.

Email Bulletin

WebMail to be Retired 12/17/08
Posted: Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

OIT will be retiring the WebMail server for the entire UTK campus on December 17th, 2008. If you are still using this WebMail interface to access your email account, please contact your department for an alternate way to access your email.

Email Bulletin

SIMS System Retired
Posted: Friday, October 31st, 2008

The SIMS system will be shut down at approximately 9:30 am, 10/31/08. If you have any problems accessing your new Tmail account, please contact the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Email Bulletin

Email Stats Updated
Posted: Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Statistics from the new email firewall servers are now available.

Please note that, because the new ProofPoint servers filter first at the connection level, then check individual emails, these stats are not directly comparable to the old stats.

When reading the new stats, keep in mind that first connections are filtered and connections from known bad sources are dropped (see the "Connections Processed" graph). Also consider that each such blocked connection could have generated multiple unwanted emails (spam, viruses, etc.), so where the old statistics would have counted each email individually as "blocked" emails, in the new stats individual emails are not counted for the blocked connections. After connections are filtered, individual emails sent through allowed connections are checked and the stats for these are reflected in the "Emails Checked" graphs.

More Information...

Systems and Applications Bulletin

OIT to Retire news.utk.edu
Posted: Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

OIT will be shutting down news.utk.edu and retiring the UTK’s Usenet news service on September 9, 2008, at 5:00 p.m.. The service was once used heavily, but usage has declined significantly over the past few years. Public news servers are available on the Internet. If you still want to access Usenet news, you may want to check out the available offerings by performing an Internet search. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the OIT Helpdesk at 974-9900.

Infrastructure Bulletin

Hess Hall Construction Causes Intermittenet Network Connectivity
Posted: Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Due to construction in Hess Hall over the summer, network connectivity in the J and K wings will be intermittent.

Security Bulletin

Recent e-mail scams
Posted: Thursday, January 17th, 2008

To: UT Knoxville Area Faculty, Staff and Students
From: Information Security Officer Robert Ridenour
Subject: Recent e-mail scams

UT Knoxville Area faculty, staff and students have been the target of two e-mail scams this week. Both e-mails attempt to appear as official university communication from the Office of Information Technology and request that the user to reply with their e-mail password. In one case, the e-mail requests the user's date of birth and office location as well.

Please do not respond to these requests. The subject lines of these two scams are as follows:

"Confirm Your E-mail Address"

"VERIFY YOUR UTK EMAIL ACCOUNT NOW"

We recognize that it can be difficult to determine whether an email is legitimate. UT will never request your password by e-mail or by telephone.

It's important to note that the From address of an email can easily be made to appear to come from anyone. Hackers often exploit this characteristic of e-mail to fool users into trusting the origin of the e-mail. When you click Reply to one of these messages, the e-mail address often will change to the real address of the attacker.

In the two cases this week, the From address appeared to come from UT while the Reply-To addresses were non-UT accounts.

Please note that the only official communications you will receive from UT's Office of Information Technology about your accounts are routine prompts to change your NetID password. Those messages, however, will take you to a designated OIT Web page that will require your password information. Exchange users may also be contacted by OIT regarding their e-mail storage quota, but these messages will not ask for any login information.

If you have questions about this information, please call the OIT HelpDesk at 974-9900.

Members of the university community are encouraged to be aware of issues related to phishing and other Internet scams. The Office of Information Technology always will have the latest security information and updates available on the Traffic Center Web site at http://oit.utk.edu/tc. More specific information about phishing scams can be found at http://security.tennessee.edu/phishing.shtml.

More Information...

Security Bulletin

Telephone Scams
Posted: Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Knoxville is currently the target for an automated phone-based internet scam.  The message will be an automated warning stating that your banking information is out-of-date and you need to log onto a reasonable sounding website (in one case a Regions banking-like URL). This a social networking SCAM intended to get your private banking information.  Please be aware that any automated phone calls that request personal information should be regarded as highly suspicious.

Infrastructure Bulletin

Network Infrastructure Upgrades
Posted: Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Network Services will be upgrading network hardware in many buildings between November and January. There will be a 30 minute network interruption for those buildings during the upgrade process. Specific notices will be sent out a week before the work is done. The following is a list of the buildings where the work will take place:

Please contact the OIT Helpdesk at 974-9900 with any problems concerning this event.

Network Services would like to take this opportunity to remind the user community of the regularly scheduled network maintenance window every Wednesday night from 10:00pm till 2:00am.

Email Bulletin

Migrate from Webmail to Tmail
Posted: Monday, August 20th, 2007

UT is moving to a new email system called Tmail. You will find some great features in Tmail that weren't available in previous e-mail software. If you are still using WebMail to access your UT email, you can migrate to Tmail to take advantage of the new functionality. We have made this very easy to do. Just go to https://oit.utk.edu/exchange/migrate/ to schedule a date to be migrated.

Email Bulletin

Cingular Service
Posted: Monday, June 4th, 2007

Cingular service was disrupted today due to a carrier switch software upgrade. This will affect all Cingular blackberry devices. The Knoxville area Cingular engineers are aware of the problem and working to correct the issue. This outage encompassed the entire Knoxville downtown area, not just the UT Knoxville campus. Service outside the downtown area is fully operational. The service is expected to be operational later this afternoon / evening. We will pass on more information when available.

Email Bulletin

Power Outage 05/17/07
Posted: Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

At approximately 5:04am on Thursday, May 17th, there was a campus-wide power outage, presumably caused by a problem or work that KUB was doing. After 8 seconds running on batteries, we were running on generator power. Sometime around 6:19am, KUB fixed their problem and utility power was restored. When the automatic switchgear transferred from the generator back to utility power, the main circuit breaker supplying power to the SMC UPS tripped. This circuit breaker is part of the SMC building electrical switchgear to which we have no access. After approximately 12 minutes (at 6:32am), the batteries on the UPS were totally discharged so the UPS shutdown and dropped the load. OIT got in contact with Facilities to try and determine what the problem was. At approximately 7:21am, Facilities found the tripped circuit breaker and reset it, restoring power to the UPS and all the servers located at SMC. The power outage caused a disruption to all of the central OIT email servers. OIT is working with Facilities to try to figure out why the main circuit breaker to the UPS tripped. We've gone though this cycle many, many times before (any time there is power interruption to SMC) and this has not happened before.

Email Bulletin

Welcome to the Email Traffic Center
Posted: Friday, March 2nd, 2007

To accommodate our growing user environment and improve communication and collaboration between members of the university community, OIT is in the process of making many improvements to university email. Throughout this process of growth and transition, some of the changes we are implementing may result in problems for our users. OIT is strongly dedicated to solving our users IT problems quickly and efficiently. The Email Traffic Center is designed to keep our users informed about problems that arise and expedite problem reporting and resolution.