Archive for October, 2005

Shorter, smarter URLs

Today we began more widely implementing the mod_rewrite apache module to rewrite some of our ugly URLs. For example, the URL for a news story previously had been http://www.gustavus.edu/news/index.cfm?id=1658. That very same story can now be accessed at http://www.gustavus.edu/news/1658. Likewise, Eric Dugdale’s class schedule can now be accessed from http://www.gustavus.edu/oncampus/facultyschedules/edugdale instead of http://www.gustavus.edu/oncampus/facultyschedules/index.cfm?action=view&username=edugdale. While this […]

Photography Contest Deadline Extended

The Campus Community Photography Contest deadline has officially been extended until December 1, 2005 due to a lack of qualifying submissions. Please read the submission guidelines and submit your photos today. You still have the chance to win an iPod nano as well as one of other cash prizes totaling $270. Contact Us Phone: 507-933-6111 […]

Replaced Switch

One of our HP 4000 switches had a bad fan that needed to be replaced before the entire thing overheated and died. Here is what Joel had to say about it: Dan and I replaced a switch in the Jackson Campus Center this morning. This switch is used by the Food Service, Health Service, Book […]

Automatic Proxy Settings

We just figured out that somewhere along the line, we broke automatic proxy configuration stuff. To fix it there are a couple of things we can do. First we added this to our /etc/dhcpd.conf file: option WPAD code 252 = string; option WPAD “http://www.gac.edu/cgi-bin/proxies”; In our old config we had option option-252 “http://www.gac.edu/cgi-bin/proxies”; but that […]

Strange Network Traffic

For some reason, since around midnight last night, there was a ton of broadcast traffic on our res-hall network. Around 150KB/s in fact. It was enough that wireless in my office was mostly unusable. Using tethereal I could see almost all of the traffic was coming from 2 MAC addresses and it was broadcast ARP […]

Gig Network to Olin 3rd Floor

Over the summer we added Gigabit connections to each floor in Olin hall. Near the beginning of the school year, the connection stopped working for the 3rd floor. We found the problem and put the gig link back in place today. Things should be even faster to the 3rd floor now. Contact Us Phone: 507-933-6111 […]

Webmail and IMAP proxy server

One of the 2 webmail servers imap proxy services stoped working around noon whatever day that was. I started the service again and now webmail should be back to normal. During that time, 50% of webmail users were not able to log in. Contact Us Phone: 507-933-6111 Email: helpline@gustavus.edu Web: https://gustavus.edu/gts Blog: https://gts.blog.gustavus.edu Remote Support: […]

Network weirdness

Just after about 6pm tonight we experienced some network weirdness. I wish I could say I knew what happened and what fixed it, but I can’t. All I know is that people mentioned error messages about duplicate ip addresses on the network and I could see lots of broadcast traffic. Most likely caused by some […]

Credit card security increased

Based on a tip at Pete Freitag’s blog, we have increased the security of our credit card forms. Always, always set autocomplete=”off” in the input tag. For example: <input type="text" name="cc" autocomplete="off" /> This feature will prevent many browsers from automatically completing the credit card fields and storing the numbers in plain text on the […]

Tips on Searching Google

Google Search Tips 2005 offers some “search syntax basics and advanced tricks for Google.com.” It might be helpful to check it out and brush up on your searching skills. You never know, it might save you a lot of time when trying to find exactly whatever it is you are looking for. Contact Us Phone: […]