Services Affected: Student Printing System (including Monitor/Pharos)

Audience: Staff and students accessing the Student Print System

Description: Update and maintenance window for the Student Printing System. The Student Printing system may be unavailable for some or all of this time.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this service interruption. Any printing can be completed at the Uniprintshop in the Central Library.

Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions regarding this outage.

ITS Service Desk Reference: HD0480629

Notice Updated: Tuesday 18th June 2013, to include additional affected services below.

Audience: Staff accessing ITS Corporate Systems Applications

Services Affected:
The following applications will be unavailable for the duration of the release

• Campus Maps
• Disabilities
• Network Admin
• Publications Output
• My Research
• UniComm
• Blackboard Staff
• Online Shop
• Maori Research

There is a chance of the following experiencing a short disruption

• FMIS Charts
• Red Carpet

Description: Updates to the ITS Corporate System Applications.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this service interruption.

Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions regarding this outage.

ITS Service Desk Reference: HD0480473

Time Frame: Monday 17th June 2013 - Ongoing

Services Affected: Mobile data usage on University supplied smart phones & tablets.

Audience: Staff who use a smart device enabled for mobile data.

Description: Smart phone and tablet users please be aware of an occasional issue arising when sending email with attachments from your mobile data enabled device.  It is possible that on rare occasions your message is not sent immediately, and is queued for delivery within your device's email client outbox.  Your phone/tablet will repeatedly attempt to send your outgoing mail message until it is successful. 

While connected to the a wireless network (such as UO-Staff) this is not such an issue, however should you leave campus and your phone/tablet automatically switches from using wireless data to mobile data, significant financial costs could be incurred. 

If your smart phone/tablet becomes hot to the touch when not being used heavily, that could potentially be a sign that it is repeatedly trying to send an email as described above.

iPhone users should also be aware that if your iPhone goes into deep sleep mode (inactive for two or more hours) when connected to a wireless network, that the phone will switch to using mobile data.

The majority of University supplied smart phones and mobile data enabled tablets are on a plan with a generous mobile data allowance.  This plan will also send you text alerts when you are at 80% of your monthly data allowance, and again when it reaches 100%. 

If you receive one of these text alerts early on in the billing cycle (the billing cycle begins on the 26th of the month, though to the 25th of the following month) please contact the ITS Service Desk for advice/support.

You may wish to also install a mobile data monitoring application such as Onavo Count to help you manage your mobile data use.  This app is available free from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.


Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions regarding this service notice. 

ITS Service Desk Reference: HD0480807

Time Frame: Thursday, 7 June 2013 onwards

Services Affected: HR reports in Business Objects

Audience: Staff who have access to HR reporting in Business Objects

Description:  An issue has arisen that is affecting some HR reports and causing them to fail intermittently. 

Work around: retry running the report again a few minutes later.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this service interruption.

Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions regarding this outage, or see our notices page for updates: http://www.otago.ac.nz/its/servicenotices/

ITS Service Desk Reference: HD0479513

ITS will ensure that queued email is cleared periodically over the weekend and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This is a copy of the email sent by Mark Borrie, Manager, Information Security, ITS on Friday 14th June 2013 to verify that the information sent is from ITS.

I am writing to all staff as a result of the significant number of incidents in recent months where staff members have been caught out by email scammers. A copy of this email can be found on the ITS website for verification purposes. Go to the ITS website and locate the Service Notice called Email Security Notice June 2013 relating to this email.

Here is some background to what has been happening and the measures that you must take to avoid being caught out by these attackers. It is crucial that all staff read this email.

Why is email security so important?

Username and password login details are becoming increasingly valuable to spammers. These login details are used for a number of purposes, one of which is to access your email account. Once logged in the spammers can use your account to send out large volumes of spam, which relies on your reputation and that of the University of Otago. This last fortnight a number of compromised email accounts were used to send out very large volumes of spam messages in a few hours.

It is likely that very soon compromised account details will be used to access other services such as HR services. This would give unauthorised access to your personal information such as bank account details used for salary payments.

When large volumes of spam are detected as coming from a single source, i.e. the University email gateway, that source is likely to be placed on a ‘blacklist’. This means that legitimate email from that source will be rejected as well as any spam.

Over the past two weeks the University’s email reputation has been impacted by these account compromises. The University was placed on a number of email blacklists and as a result many staff members have not been able to communicate with others as normal. ITS is working with other parties to resolve this issue.

In addition to sorting out blacklisting sites, a considerable amount of time has to be spent on cleaning up computer systems when staff are compromised in this way. Much of this clean-up time has to occur after hours due to the urgency of the situation.

How do you avoid getting caught out by email scams?

ITS has information available on the ITS website (check out the ITS Frequently Asked Questions under the Spam & Phishing category) about email scams. Here is a summary of what to watch for and what your options are:

1. Legitimate websites should never ask for confirmation of personal or confidential details by email. This includes usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
2. Legitimate websites should not request that you go to their website to confirm details (except in response to someone registering with them).
3. Be wary of web links in emails and attached documents. You can check if the link is what it claims to be by hovering (not clicking) your mouse over the link and comparing the addresses. If you are unsure of the address, treat it as suspicious.
4. Scammers will try to make the message look legitimate by copying logos, formats and email addresses. Do not rely on these as a sign of legitimacy.

What to do if you encounter a suspicious email

1. If a legitimate website appears to be breaking one of the rules above, contact them through a known channel to request that they change their processes. If you have just entered data with the site, such as registering for a service/account, and they ask for immediate confirmation, then this is probably OK.
2. Do not respond to suspicious emails immediately. If you are off-campus, wait until you are back on campus as University protection systems will provide better protection for your email account and your computer. It will also give you an opportunity to check with your colleagues to see if they have also received the email.
3. Do not respond to these emails using your smartphone or tablet as it is harder to recognise fake emails on mobile devices.
4. Never visit the websites listed in the email. Some of these sites will attempt to infect your computer simply when you visit them. Just being curious can create extra work for support staff.
5. If you think you have been caught out by a scammer please report it straight away to the ITS Service Desk. Most importantly, change your password immediately.

If you have any questions about this notice please contact me or the ITS Service Desk.

Regards,

Mark Borrie
Manager, Information Security
ITS

Service Desk Number: HD0478884

Audience: Everyone using the self-service password management service (www.otago.ac.nz/password)
 
The option to use your challenge questions to allow you to reset your University username password is not currently working. If you have forgotten your password, please contact the ITS Service Desk to have it reset.
 
If you know what your password is, you can reset it via the self-service password management service.
 
Our apologies for any inconvenience caused by this issue. An urgent support call has been raised and we will update this notice when the issue has been resolved.
 
Please contact the Service Desk if have any questions or need any assistance with this issue.
 
Service Desk Reference: Call HD0473033

Due to the upgrade, your existing book mark to the Staff Web Kiosk will no longer work.

To resolve this you could:

1. Use the following link to access web kiosk.

    You can add this as a book mark if you wish: https://concept.otago.ac.nz

2. You can also access web kiosk from the university web page:

    http://www.otago.ac.nz/

   Click on the link “Staff Web Kiosk” under “For Otago Staff”.

If you are still having problems, kindly clear your internet cache, from your web browsers.
To do so, you could follow either one of the below, according to the browser which you are using:

Internet Explorer 9 and 8
1. Click Tools, and select Delete Browsing History
2. Deselect Preserve Favorites website data
3. Select Temporary Internet files, Cookies, and History.
4. Click Delete.

Firefox 3.5 and above for Mac OS X
1. From the Tools menu, select Clear Recent History.
2. From the Time range to clear: drop-down menu, select the desired range;
3. To clear your entire cache, select Everything.
4. Click the down arrow next to "Details" to choose which elements to clear.
5. Click Clear Now.

Firefox 4 and above for Windows
1. Click the orange Firefox button, and then select Clear Recent History from the History menu.
2. From the Time range to clear: drop-down menu, select the desired range; To clear your entire cache, select Everything.
3. Click the down arrow next to "Details" to choose what history elements to clear (e.g., check Cookies to clear cookies).
4. Click Clear Now.

Chrome
1. In the browser bar, enter: chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
2. Select the items you want to clear (e.g. Clear browsing history, Clear download history, Empty the cache, Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data).
3. Click Clear browsing data.

Safari
1. From the Safari menu, select Reset Safari.
2. From the menu, select the items you want to reset, and then click Reset.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this Web Kiosk update

Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions regarding this outage, or see our notices page for updates: http://www.otago.ac.nz/its/servicenotices/

Service Desk Reference: HD0477892

Audience: All University staff and students

Description:
ITS applies Microsoft software security updates to all University of Otago Windows based servers during the second week of every month.

The schedule for applying these updates is:

• 5pm-12am, Wednesday and Thursday (these updates won’t interrupt normal access to services)
• 5pm-12am, Friday.

These security updates may result in a short interruption to your access if ITS needs to restart a service. You will be advised of any specific ITS services that will be affected on the second Wednesday of each month.

If you have any questions or need any help, please:

• contact the ITS Service Desk
• check the ITS Service Notices webpage for updates.

Services Affected: Student iPrint and Windows 8 devices

Audience: Students using Windows 8

Description: Windows 8 will not work with the current implementation of iPrint. As the new student printing system is due for launch at the end of June 2013 there are currently no plans to upgrade the iPrint system.

The work around is to copy files you need to print onto a student computer and print from there.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Please contact the ITS Service Desk if you have any questions.