Tuesday’s Internet outage
As I’m sure you all noticed, we had a major internet outage on Tuesday. We started with intermittent disruptions until the system completely failed by 10:28 am and stayed down until nearly 7 pm. The good news is that it wasn’t a fault of any of our equipment or firewall settings. The bad news is that it was K20 again. They did do some emergency maintenance late Monday night, but this was unrelated. Campus had to notify Frontier (the K20 service provider) of the failure. Apparently, there was a “device failure” associated with the fiber trunk that we are on.
This incident has sparked new interest in finding an alternative solution for us to have either a backup plan for when K20 is down or to switch service providers. There are pros and cons for all the possible scenarios with the biggest con being the cost. We will explore the choices and report back at a later date.
Other issues
email auto-redirects
Have you ever gotten one of those pop-up alerts in Outlook saying that autodirect is redirecting your account to a website (they show the link) and asking if it is ok to proceed? I get these periodically. There is also a checkbox for allowing this action for all future instances. What is this and is it safe? Yes, it is safe. Our email server is now hosted within the cloud, which is not a static location. If you have Outlook open and you lose your connection, even briefly, Outlook has to reconnect to your account. Most of the time, the location will be the same, but not always. This is where the autodirect function kicks in. You can think of it like the old time telephone operator that would answer your call and ask where to direct your call. That person would then plug your line into the outgoing plug for your destination or to another operator farther down the line that would continue to direct your call until you finally reach the person you wanted to speak to. With your email, the autodirect could pass you off through multiple digital switches until it gets to the final destination. Fortunately, this happens much faster than the old phone connection. But getting back to the point, Outlook’s default setting is to alert you each time it needs to go looking for your account. If you don’t want to be bothered by the alerts, check the box next time it pops up and you shouldn’t see it again. (Unless a Microsoft update resets the defaults.)
Campus ITS Updates
- The weekend of Dec. 2-3 Information Technology Services (ITS) will be migrating the on-premises mainframe to cloud hosting. The system will go offline at 2 am on Dec. 2nd and the cloud services will be available no later than 10 pm Sunday, Dec. 3rd. During this period AIS services, e-check processing, and other services dependent upon the mainframe will be unavailable. Once the migration is complete, all services should function normally.
- As already reported, during the week of Dec. 11th the Polycom infrastructure will undergo a transition from two independent infrastructure environments to a single clustered environment. During this time, registered endpoints will drop registration and will require re-registration. The video conferencing support team will coordinate with stakeholders to make sure their endpoints are registered correctly. No preparation is required prior to maintenance.
What this means to us: Limited use of the video conferencing system during the week of Dec. 11th.