Elizabethtown College ITS News 
Back to top 9/20/2007 ALERT: AIM Computer Virus The ITS Department has seen evidence of an AIM computer virus spreading across campus. The message APPEARS to come from a friend and says something like, “Hey, I found this picture of us, do you mind if I put it on my Myspace?" Clicking on the link will infect your computer. The AIM fix tool does not yet clean this virus. If you believe your computer has been infected you may contact the ITS Help Desk at helpdesk@etown.edu to schedule an appointment to have our computer diagnosed.
This would be a good time to remind everyone to NEVER click on an attachment or a link unless you are 100 percent sure that the APPARENT sender actually sent the message. Many messages that appear to come from friends are actually sent by viruses in an attempt to trick you. There can be very serious consequences from clicking on these links and attachments. Back to top 8/9/2007 ITS Blog This ITS Department has started a web log (blog) to keep the campus community informed of IT news as it relates to Elizabethtown College. We hope you find it to be a useful resource and encourage readers to use the comment feature to share your thoughts on the posts. The first three posts are “ITS Blog Begins – Good Resources for Higher Ed”, “Web 2.0 and Higher Education” and “How Not to Use PowerPoint.” Those with a news reader may use this link to subscribe to the posts. Let us know what you think. Back to top 6/27/2007 Problems with E-mail Faculty, Staff and Students, This is an explanation of some email problems the campus has experienced in the last two days. We have two Security Gateway servers as part of our email system. These gateways run Symantec software to check inbound and outbound messages for viruses and spam. 97% of the mail that arrives at the gateway servers either has a virus or is identified as spam. These messages thankfully are dropped before they clutter our inboxes. At times a machine in someone’s office or dorm room on campus will have a virus and will attempt to send infected messages off campus. The gateway servers will generally trap these messages also and discard them before they go out. Early Monday morning the control center for the Symantec software on the gateway servers stopped processing some inbound and outbound messages properly. The network/system administrators have been on the phone with Symantec tech support for hours during the past two days to try to resolve this problem. They reinstalled the Symantec software on the gateway servers earlier today and we think this will resolve the initial problem with the control center. The initial problem appears to have caused a secondary problem. The college email address has been placed on a blacklist due to the system problems. These lists are maintained to identify organizations that send spam. Consequently, many outbound messages are possibly being rejected by organizations indicating that the sender is not authorized to send mail to that organization. The network/system administrators are working with the blacklisting company to resolve this issue, and it will be cleared up over the course of the next 24 hours. As our network/system administrators worked to reinstall the Symantec application on the two gateway servers this morning, it was necessary to take each one offline in turn. Consequently some mail was being rejected when people from off campus tried to email us this morning. It their organization has a sophisticated email system it likely re-sent the message a little later. If they don’t have a sophisticated system it may have returned the mail to the sender as being rejected by us. If you sent important email off campus in the past two days, please check with the recipient to determine if they received the message. If you were expecting an important message from off campus, please notify the sender that you have not received it. Please accept our thanks for your patience and understanding as we work on solutions to these problems. Sincerely, Ron Heasley Back to top 5/15/2007 2007-2008 Computer Lab & Podium Software Upgrades Faculty, Over the summer, Information and Technology Services (ITS) will be upgrading software in computer labs and podiums on campus for the 2007-2008 academic year. The biggest change for these computers will be upgrades from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007. Additionally, we plan to upgrade approximately 9 other packages. The list of software that is currently installed in the labs as well as the proposed versions for the fall can be found here and will be updated with any future changes. Please review this list and ensure we have included all of the software you plan to use for your classes next year. If you have requests for additional software or changes to the versions, these requests must be made to helpdesk@etown.edu by June 15th. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Brian Helm (helmb@etown.edu x1568) or me. Ron Heasley Back to top 4/12/2007 Student Job Opportunities Available Information & Technology Services is looking to hire additional students for positions for the 2007-2008 school year. Applications must be received by May 18th. Available positions include:
Additional information (including descriptions and job requirements) on these positions can be found here and the application can also be downloaded online. Questions should be directed to Karen Eatherton at x1372 or eathertonk@etown.edu. Back to top 4/12/2007 Dial-in Network Access to be Discontinued On June 30, 2007, Information and Technology Services will discontinue dial-in access to the college's network. For additional information and links to alternative Internet Service Providers, please click here. Back to top 3/15/2007 30 minutes of Internet downtime late this evening Comcast Business Services, our Internet Service Provider (ISP), will perform an upgrade to the campus Internet connection late this evening between midnight and 6:00 AM. We anticipate losing our Internet service for about 30 minutes, but there is a potential for the service to be down for as long as 4 hours during this 6-hour window. As always, your patience and understanding are appreciated. Back to top 3/12/2007 Daylight Saving Time and Blackboard Blackboard is not recognizing times correctly after the change to Daylight Saving Time. For example, a quiz to be available at 2:00 will not actually be available until 3:00. Our server administrator contacted Blackboard support about this issue and they admitted that they should have notified us of a Java update. Our server administrator will perform this update between 6:00 and 7:00 AM Tuesday. Therefore the Blackboard server will be unavailable during this time. This downtime will not affect CCEDL classes which use an offsite Blackboard server. Back to top 2/16/2007 Scheduled Internet outage early Tuesday morning The campus Internet Service Provider (ISP), Comcast, has a scheduled outage this coming Tuesday, February 20, 2007. The maintenance window will be from 12:01 AM to 6:00 AM. There will be an approximate 30 minute outage during that window. Please contact Ron Heasley with questions regarding this outage. Back to top 2/14/2007 Closed due to inclement weather The Helpdesk will be closed on Wednesday, February 14th. Staff will be checking e-mail (helpdesk@etown.edu) periodically throughout the day in the event you need assistance. The office will re-open at 8:00am on Thursday, February 15th. Back to top 2/10/2007 30-Minute Internet Outage Scheduled for Monday, February 12 The campus Internet Service Provider (ISP), Comcast, has a scheduled outage this coming Monday, February 12. The maintenance window will be from 12:01 a.m. – 6 a.m. There will be an approximate 30-minute outage during that window. Please contact Ron Heasley at HEASLERP with questions regarding this outage. Back to top 2/5/2007 Server Maintenance This Evening A Dell engineer will be working with
the ITS system administrators to perform maintenance from 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM this
evening on the nine servers listed. Each server will be unavailable for
approximately 15 minutes during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience
this may cause.
Back to top 1/26/2007 Server Maintenance This Evening ITS will be performing maintenance
on nine servers from 12:01 AM -10:00 AM Saturday. During this time these
servers will be unavailable for short periods. The servers included in the
maintenance are listed here.
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