First, I’d like to say Congratulations and Farewell to Kelsey as she leaves us for new adventures at WSU Spokane. Amongst her many duties here at the Center, she took on managing the room scheduling and AMS troubleshooting. I’m sure everyone will miss her, especially the first time someone has to deal with a dropped class or failed call-in. We hope her replacement will be up to the task.
Although things here at the Center have been fairly uneventful in terms of IT issues, the same can’t be said for Pullman. They continue to be plagued with network security problems. The biggest issue seems to relate to mitigating Spectre/Meltdown attacks. This is just the most recent in a long list of targeted attacks against various networks and operating systems. It seems that as fast as security updates are released, the hackers find new vulnerabilities requiring more “patches”. The frustrating part of constantly having to install the updates is that often the patches cause unexpected behaviors in software and compatibility. This is one of the reasons why myWSU keeps “breaking”, along with other network services that require authentication. So as frustrated as we are with some of their services, imagine how frustrated the IT people are while having to figure out what broke, what it will take to fix it, and worry about what is going to break next. Talk about job security!
In other news: While Jim is at Pullman he will be meeting with the folks at CAHNRS IT to find out what it will take to get everything finished up here. Hopefully, I’ll have a report for you next week on the outcome of those talks.
That’s it for today.