This is a general notice that a number of technology anomalies causing disruption have been occurring throughout Denison’s network infrastructure (and beyond) since the start of the semester. IT staff, in conjunction with several outside consultants, continue to work around the clock to bring stability and expected performance to all systems and services. Instability and poor performance with a variety of services is not wide spread or consistent across the campus areas but the incoming Trouble Call volume of the Help Desk is steady. Technicians are resolving problems as quickly as possible. Electronic classroom technology issues will be resolved as a first priority, followed by faculty, staff, and student wireless connectivity reported issues.  If you have any problem associated with connecting to the network, wired or wireless, please report it to the ITS Help Desk immediately at 740.587.6395 or helpdesk@denison.edu

Pending and resolved issues:

  • Blackboard performance (slow): Believed to be largely resolved; intermittent slowness was experienced over the past week. This was primarily experienced by those on-campus but reports also were taken of slowness when connecting off-campus. There was a problem with our Internet connection as reported by Oarnet, occuring through Wed afternoon, that may have contributed to the problem. The Blackboard platform is hosted by the University of Cincinnati.  It was upgraded to a new version during the summer.
  • Internet performance (slow or unavailable): Believe to be resolved; reports were individual (not wide spread) and sporadic; Denison’s ISP Oarnet identified an issue in the Ohio fiber ring and corrected; the holiday delayed the resolution.
  • Wireless (cannot connect or seemingly unavailable): Believed to be largely resolved although can re-occur; IT is monitoring affected areas closely. Affected approximately 30% of student residences and two academic buildings and Slayter. Meru access point radios are sporadically going off-line. IT has put in place a work-around to re-connect radios while awaiting a permanent fix from the manufacturer. Radios may continue to experience interruption.
  • Connection to Internet or U: and S: drives impeded (user gets an “unable to connect to server” message): Not resolved; IT is actively working on this problem with the core infrastructure vendor support. Diagnosis has been tedious but a fix is on the horizon!  Progress continues.  If reported to the help desk, technicians are able to resolve for individual machines.  Please call if you have trouble.

     

 

Update: the Cognos upgrade will not be happening tomorrow, September 5th, as we’d originally planned. We will reschedule the work for a maintenance window soon.

Cognos will be unavailable from 5am-7am on Thursday September 5 while it is upgraded from from 10.1 to 10.2.1.  No changes should be made to reports or queries after 5pm on Wednesday, September 5.  If you have difficulty with Cognos after this post has been updated to indicate the upgrade is complete, please email helpdesk@denison.edu or call (740)587-6395.  Please leave a message if earlier than 8 am.

 

We will be performing maintenance on authentication servers during 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday, August 13. BigRedID logins to browser-based services may be interrupted during this time.

Update: 6 a.m. system maintenance is complete.

Update 10/29/12 9:30AM:

We believe this issue has been corrected. If you experience further issues logging in to MyDenison, please contact the ITS Help Desk.

Original Post:

Internet Explorer 9 users cannot currently login to MyDenison.  Please use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome until the issue is resolved. Alternatively, you may access the following services directly from these URLs:

If you would like to be notified when the problem is corrected, please contact the ITS Help Desk at 740-587-6395 or helpdesk@denison.edu.

Several Denison-hosted websites and services will be unavailable for a brief outage between 6:30 and 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, August 7 for database server maintenance.  These services include:

  • Denison Apps (Web interface only)
  • MyDenison
  • Freestyle
  • DU Forums
  • Admissions Web Scheduling
  • Denison Online Journals
  • The Denison Museum
  • Student Employment
  • OrgSync
  • Symplicty
  • Denison Wiki

If you are unable to access any of these services during this time period, please wait a few minutes and try again.

Note: Many services, such as Denison Apps, will still be available during this brief window, if you are already logged in.

this site is designed to steal your username and password

Many of us found a message in our email which provided a link to an updated Denison webmail page. The image shows that the link takes you to a site that will harvest your email username and password.

If you are using Denison Apps: please open the message and click the down arrow beside the Reply button. You will see a selection marked “Report Phishing” in the menu that appears. Please select that in order to report the phishing attack to Google to improve the identification and blocking of future phishing attacks.  Please note, this option is only available in the web (Gmail) interface for Denison Apps, it is not available if you are using Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or another client to access your Denison Apps email.

 

There will be a short network outage as maintenance is performed on one of our firewalls during our Thursday morning maintenance window.  Network outage ended at 6:46 a.m.

Oracle Calendar will be down for database maintenance. Oracle Calendar restarted at 7:00 a.m.

Expect all services to be available again before 7:30 a.m.