All Banner systems ( INB & SSB/web) are currently unavailable. We have Ellucian technicians working on the problem and will update you as we know more and when the systems are back and available for use.

Thank you-

Carol Peddie

Associate Dean & Director, Enterprise Applications

Library & Information Services,  Middlebury College

The following essential network maintenance activity is planned for this Sunday morning that will result in extended service interruptions throughout the campus.

Between  6:30 and 7:15 am the network core’s components will be upgraded.  While all of the components of the network core are redundant, not all parts of the network throughout the campus have a path back to both sides of the network core.  As a result there will be a 20 – 30 minute network service interruption for the majority of buildings on campus.

Between 7:00 and 8:15 am critical network aggregation switches that connect campus buildings and server farms to the network core will be upgraded.  This will result in a complete interruption of network connectivity of approximately 30 minutes throughout the campus.  This includes access to the College’s primary web sites, Email, MiddFiles – all systems hosted at Middlebury.

Between 7:45 and 9:00 am our border gateway routers and other components that connect the network core with the Internet will be upgraded.  We expect four 3-5 minute periods where Internet routing will be in flux and expect transient loss of Internet connectivity for the Middlebury campus.  During these four 3-5 minute periods, the VPNs with MIIS and Ellucian may be interrupted briefly, this would impact reaching Banner SSB and INB.

These network upgrades are essential and must be completed in a timely manner.  We appreciate your patience as we strive to keep our network operating optimally.

The Wiley Online Library is non-functional for us and for other libraries around the country. There has not been any official notification from Wiley, so I cannot predict when access will be restored. When I know more, I will add an update in a comment to this post.

We have received a message from Remote-Learner, our Moodle hosting company, that they will be doing some maintenance to improve the security of the service. Expect disruptions in service between 1-6am on Saturday, February 16th.

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Dear Valued Client,

In order to install new security upgrades and additional security features, Remote-Learner’s IT technical support division has planned a five-hour maintenance. During the maintenance period internet connectivity may be briefly disrupted several times on February 16th from 1:00 am EST to 6:00 am EST.

The new upgrades and security features will provide additional hosting security for clients.  Ultimately, we believe that you will be pleased with the security updates, and we ask in advance that you accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may experience. We welcome your feedback on our efforts to continue to provide quality customer service and we request that you direct any questions and concerns related to this scheduled maintenance to Remote-Learner’s support division.

Sincerely,

The Remote-Learner Team

The telephone outage that began early this afternoon was cleared as of approximately 3:30pm. If you are still experiencing problems, please let us know via email telecom@middlebury.edu.

The Banner Systems (both INB & SSB/ Banner Web) as well as EPM Hyperion Reporting will be unavailable tonight Jan 21 and Fri evening Jan 25.

Schedule:

Monday January 21- All users logged out of Banner by 9pm ET (6pm Pacific) –  Banner System will be available after3am ET (12am Pacific) Tuesday January 22.

This means time card entry/approval will not be available Monday evening Jan 21 after 9pm EST but will be available on Tuesday morning Jan 22 after 3am EST.

Friday January 25 - All users logged out of Banner by 9pm ET (6pm Pacific) –  Banner System will be available after3am ET (12am Pacific) Saturday January 26.

What is happening during this time?  We have scheduled a Load Test to be run against our production Banner Web system.  During the system load test personnel from Middlebury College will work in conjunction with technicians at Ellucian to simultaneously Load Test and Performance Tune our Banner Database Server and the Banner Web (SSB) environments.   To facilitate the testing all users must log out of Banner and remain logged out beginning at 9pm Eastern Time (6pm Pacific) each night until 3am Eastern Time(12 am Pacific) the following morning.  Any user remaining in the system after 9pm ETwill be forcibly logged out by systems administration.

We appreciate your patience & cooperation as we continually strive for improved performance on these critical systems.

Carol Peddie

Associate Dean, LIS

Director Enterprise Applications

This Sunday morning we’re planning the following activities:

(1)    Between 6:30 and 7:30 we’ll be applying some security patches to the Library server “zeppo”.  We expect a less than 10 minute outage of the following services:  MiddCat, My MiddCat, Ilsley cataglog, Sheldon catalog, the Millennium client used by library staff.

(2)    Between 6:30 and 7:30 we’ll upgrade the Service Building network connection to 10 Gbps from 1 Gbps .  This will interrupt all network services to the Service Building for less than 20 minutes.

(3)    Between 7:00 and 8:30 we’ll re-route the network fiber connections for Stewart.  This will interrupt all network services Stewart for less than 10 minutes.

(4)    Between 7:00 and 9:00 we’ll re-route the network fiber connections and switch out some associated infrastructure for McCullough.  This will interrupt all network services to McCullough for 2 less than 10 minute periods.

(5)    Between 7:30 and 9:30 we’ll re-route the network fiber connections that provide connectivity to the large dorms on the north side of campus.  This will interruption all network connections to these buildings 2-3 times for less than 2 minutes each.

(6)    Between 7:30 and 9:30 we’ll re-route the network fiber connections that provide connectivity to BiHall.  This will interrupt all network connections to BiHall for less than 2 minutes.

We appreciate your patience as we continue to enhance the performance and reliability of our IT infrastructure.

Over the last week Middlebury experienced a dramatic increase in the number of successful phishing attacks that resulted in Middlebury user accounts being compromised. A phishing attack is the effort of maliciously using email or a web site to try to unwittingly gain information about another individual. These recent attacks resulted in two distinct outcomes. The first was that many of these accounts were leveraged to generate large amounts of spam. The second result from these compromised accounts is that the attackers attempted to connect to the Middlebury network with the exposed user’s credentials.

This past week many individuals across our campus received an email that looked similar to the one below:

————————————–

Message with “Middlebury” as the display name

Dear Member,

You Have 1 New Message

Click here to read

Sincerely,
Middlebury Webmail Service

————————————

The link in this message redirected people to copy of the Middlebury CAS Logon page. Two important things to know about email from Middlebury IT Services. First, Library and Information Services will never ask for your user credentials in an email. Second, if you find yourself on any web page that is asking for credentials, always verify the address in your web browser’s address bar, to ensure that the web page is where you really want to be. Just because a web page has the Middlebury logo does not mean it is always a Middlebury web site.

To protect against phishing remember the following rules:

1. Never click on any links in a suspicious email.
2. If you ever receive an unsolicited email  and you do not recognize the sender delete the message.
3. If you receive an email that requests your credentials or asks you to click a link which takes you to a web site that requests your credentials, do not click the link but rather go to the web site through the institution home page, Middlebury.edu for example.
4. If you suspect an email is fraudulent delete the message.
5. If you ever have questions regarding phishing or the content of an email call the Helpdesk.

The Helpdesk will help you determine if the email is legitimate. Please do NOT click on any links in a suspect email message.

If you suspect that you may have recently provided your Middlebury credentials to a fraudulent web site or email address, you should immediately reset your password at go/activate and then contact the Helpdesk.

If you become aware that your Middlebury account has been disabled, you must contact the Helpdesk to resolve.

More information is available at the Middlebury College Information Security web site at go/infoSec or contact the InfoSec office at infosec@middlebury.edu.

Ian Burke

Network Security Administrator

Middlebury College

infosec@middlebury.edu

This Sunday Sept 2 we will finalize our work on the new network architecture. This will result in a planned  15-30 minute outage that is scheduled for approx. 6:30-7:00 am EST. Please remember during this time, nobody on or off campus will have access to network services (this means all systems will be unavailable – Email, Banner, middfiles, everything including our websites middlebury.edu & miis.edu.)   The Snow Bowl will also have no phone service during the outage.  

In addition Ellucian will be performing some work on the Banner systems to improve some of the recent performance issues we have experienced in the past few weeks.   Banner will be offline from approx. 8am-10am while this maintenance is performed.

Schedule:

6:30 –  approx. 7:00am EST – network maintenance – all systems unavailable

8:00- approx. 10:00 am EST Banner systems will be unavailable

 We will send around a message once all systems are back up and available – we approximate this to be around 10am.

 Thank you again for your continued patience and cooperation while we perform this important work.

We are pleased to announce the new middfiles structure is now up and available for use!
Please note the following changes:

You can now access middfiles at:

-for Windows/PC users – PLEASE RESTART/REBOOT your computer first – then you should not have to make any changes, but the new path is \\middlebury.edu\middfiles

-For Apple/Mac users – you will have to use the new server names & paths listed below.

afp://myhome.middlebury.edu (for home directories- your personal folders)

afp://orgs.middlebury.edu (for ORGS – your department folders)

afp://classes.middlebury.edu (for classfolders and curricular resources)

afp://shed.middlebury.edu (for software, studentorgs, committees, specialprojects, and others not mentioned above)

For more information on file servers and connections contact the helpdesk. helpdesk@middlebury.edu