Technology Services

Category: GAC IT

  • Keeping our Mac’s patched

    —

    by

    doachs

    In an effort to keep all the Apple OS X Mac’s on campus patched and running all the latest and greatest software, we had to come up with a good way to remotely manage them. Apple’s Remote Desktop app comes in very handy and helps, but we wanted a more scriptable way to do it…

  • gustavus.edu dissappeared

    —

    by

    doachs

    For a little while this morning gustavus.edu was unreachable. As a result people on and off campus were not able to access the Gustavus homepage (www.gustavus.edu)and possibly not receive email to @gustavus.edu addresses. @gac.edu email and websites were not having issues. The problem was fixed at about 9:30am this morning.

  • Bye Bye Solen

    —

    by

    doachs

    This morning at about 7:45am, we pulled the network connection from solen.gac.edu and turned on a different server with that IP address. The new server then listens for requests going to solen’s IP address and redirects the services Solen used to perform to their appropriate location. We will be monitoring who is connecting to this…

  • Spamassassin Changes

    —

    by

    doachs

    It appears as though our current spamassassin setup is adding a significant amount of load on our home directories. As a result I am looking into ways to keep spamassassins current effectiveness while reducing the load it places on the disk drives of the home directories. Over the next few days I will be making…

  • Lots of students

    —

    by

    doachs

    As you probably already know, Gustavus accepted a few too many students this year. That means more students, staff, and facutly than usual. Which for us means more email, more internet usage, and more network traffic in general. At the last minute they had to convert many open spaces in to new dorm rooms. That…

  • Core Router Changes

    —

    by

    doachs

    As of 3:15pm today, we have turned on a feature of our core router that allows it to detect and slow the spread of viruses on campus. Therefore if any computer on campus displays virus like behavior ( making connections to lots of different computers within a very short period of time), that computers connection…

  • Email Failure

    —

    by

    doachs

    For an hour or so today our email server was rejecting email. The server would respond with an error that the account does not exist. It turns out that it could not look up users in LDAP because one of our LDAP servers was having a problem handling the load. The LDAP server thought it…

  • Spamassassin Upgrade

    —

    by

    doachs

    Due to security concerns, I upgraded our spamassin servers to the latest version 3.0.4 today. Hopefully that won’t cause any problems. Although spamassin’s role has greatly deminished lately since most spam has been filtered out by postifx before it ever even makes it to spamassin anyway.

  • Wireless Update

    —

    by

    doachs

    Wireless coverage on campus got a boost today as we upgraded the wireless access point on the roof of Rundstrom. It used to have an old Orinoco wireless card attached to a directional antenna. Now we have installed a new high powered Tropos access point like the ones on International , Pittman, and Norelius. The…

  • South West Hall Network

    —

    by

    doachs

    Today Ethan and I got started on installing the network hardware in South West Hall. The new building will have a nice 10/100 MBit network with each half of the building having its own 1GBit uplink to the rest of campus. Hopefully that will make the heavy network users in that building next year very…