Technology Services

Author: doachs

  • Even easier way to call your room for free

    —

    by

    doachs

    This week it got even easier to have your friends and family call your dorm room phone number for free. Just last week I mentioned how easy it was to call Gustavus phone numbers from any internet connection in the world by using a SIP based VoIP phone. Well, the company that gives away the…

  • Call your room phone for free

    —

    by

    doachs

    Gustavus has now joined the likes of MIT, Harvard, Yale, and many others in having campus phones reachable simply by dialing a users email address. The inspiration for this comes from the Internet2 SIP.edu working group. The end result is that you can now tell your family and friends that they can call your room…

  • Webmail Issues Tonight

    —

    by

    doachs

    A little before 11:00pm tonight, one of our webmail systems started to have a problem. The other webmail server unfortunately was unable to handle the load all by its self and started to die as well. At around 11:30pm both webmail servers were back up and operational again.

  • Network Upgrades

    —

    by

    doachs

    Over the past couple of weeks, we have made some improvements to the campus computer network. The most noticeable of these will be for the residents of Pittman. Four more Wi-Fi access points were installed to help improve the wireless coverage in that dorm. Less noticeable changes were made to the wired network in Complex.…

  • Snow, in time-lapse

    —

    by

    doachs

    Just for fun, I put together a little time-lapse video of the recent snow storm as seen by our Stadium Webcam. If there are other days you think would make a good time-lapse video, please let me know.

  • Home directory access this morning

    —

    by

    doachs

    At about 4:00am this morning our NFS server crashed. At about 6:30am we temporarily restored access to home directories with our backup system until the primary system could be rebooted at 7:10am. Some email was delayed during this time and is being delivered now. All systems were back up and running by 7:30am.

  • Comcast Blocked Gustavus Email

    —

    by

    doachs

    Here is a little story about why spam sucks, and why computer security is important. Over the weekend I received and email because one of our users got an error message when trying to send an email to a family member. That family member had a comcast.net email address. The error message from Comcast’s mailserver…

  • 2 New Spam Checkers

    —

    by

    doachs

    Since it does not look like spam is going away any time soon and the amount of spam being sent to Gustavus addresses is increasing every day, we needed to add more spam checking servers. Checking as much email as we get for spam is a very big task. As a result we now have…

  • Internet Connection (update)

    —

    by

    doachs

    At about 6:00pm we noticed that our internet service provider was having some problems. Accessing Gustavus resources from off campus was not working at all. Shortly after that many users on campus began having problems connecting to AOL and accessing websites such as Slashdot.org while other sites were working. The problem appeared to be a…

  • Internet Slowness (fixed)

    —

    by

    doachs

    You may have noticed that some websites and things such as AOL IM have been slow or not functioning well today. We believe that the cause of the problem was a backhoe incident near Valley Fair ( Just south of the Twin Cities). Well, maybe not excatly a backhoe, but a fiber optic cable was…