Notices

UNPLANNED SERVICE OUTAGES

Possible Email Bounces From Normally-Working Sites

8/8/16 We have been receiving reports of email bounces from people/organizations that normally work without problems. We think we know what is happening. We recently discovered that one of our CS student accounts had been compromised and was being used to send spam. Even though we disabled the account as soon as the compromise was discovered, several mail server reputation services had already classified us as a possible source of spam. As a result of that classification, some organizations have decided to temporarily reject email from our mail server. We can't predict ahead of time which organizations those are, since there are a variety of reputation services, and individual organizations differ in the ways they make use of reputation information.

This problem will fix itself automatically over the next few days, as the reputation services take note of the fact that we have stopped sending spam. There's no way to speed up this process, unfortunately.

This sort of problem doesn't often happen to us. But when it does, it causes headaches like the unexpected bounce messages some people have received. We will be implementing some new processes that we expect will allow us to react more quickly to situations like this, before they reach the point where other organizations stop accepting our mail.

We will update this page once the reputation scores have returned to normal.

Systems Down

masters12 (grad net computer located in G61) is down due to a bad disk. Grad/Research Net users can use any of the other Grad/Research Net Linux systems until we've replaced the disk. No ETA on the disk replacement timeframe yet.

PLANNED SERVICE OUTAGES

PLANNED OUTAGE...

******UPDATE: 8-10-16 8:30am. The system outage described below was completed by 8am and all services have returned to normal. *****

****UPDATE: 8-10-16 6:50AM Due to a hardware issue, the outage below has been extended to 8am.****

WHAT: Major CS Grad/Research Net IT services outage, as we make configuration changes to our new file server.

WHEN: Wednesday, August 10, from 1am to approx 7am. CHANGED TO 8AM!

DETAILS: Our new CS Grad/Research Net home directory file server, rtfm.cs.jhu.edu, will be shut down so that system configuration changes can be made to it (which will affect other CS computing services as well), early morning on Wednesday, 8/10.

As a result of this configuration change process, several of our CS services will be unavailable during the shutdown/upgrade (described below). If there are any unexpected complications during the configuration changes that will delay the restoration of services, we will update the CS IT Support Wiki's Notices page at https://support.cs.jhu.edu/wiki/Notices

Suspended (Unavailable) Grad/Research Net services while rtfm.cs.jhu.edu is down:

• CS Mail service, both incoming and outgoing, will be suspended for CS Grad/Research Net users (as this fileserver works in tandem with our mail server.) Incoming mail should be queued by the sender until our mail service is back up again. Outgoing mail will not be available.

• IMAP, POP, and Webmail from our CS (Grad/Research Net) Mail server will be unavailable.

• Some CS webpages, including user (and possibly lab and other CS pages), will be unavailable.

• Grad/Research Net user accounts/home directories will be inaccessible during the downtime.

• SMB File Shares (CS Office Staff uses these) will be unavailable.

• ssh service to our CS Grad/Research Net Linux boxes (masters1 through masters16, gradx, and gradz) will be unavailable.

• Console (desktop) access to masters1 through masters16 will be unavailable.

• MySQL service via the mysql.cs.jhu.edu server will be unavailable.

Ugrad Net users: During the rtfm.cs.jhu.edu shutdown/configuration changes, email directed to your ugrad acct @cs.jhu.edu will not be immediately delivered. Other Ugrad Net services should remain available.

CS COMPUTING LAB AVAILABILITY

MH 122 (Ugrad Lab)

See post about 8/10/16 file server Planned Outage on the Notices page.

MH G-61 (Masters/Ugrad Lab)

See post about 8/10/16 file server Planned Outage on the Notices page.