Last Friday (3/2) afternoon the Entomology building experienced a lengthy period of power fluctuations – lights flickering, power backups (UPS*) triggered, and heating system disrupted. The cause may be due to a failing power backup supply unit on the network hub located on the second floor. When the unit was unplugged the fluctuation eventually stopped. Fluctuations returned after the unit was plugged back in. Could be coincidence or the UPS might have caused feedback. Unplugging the unit resulted in the loss of both internet and phones for Entomology, the Annex, and the Ecology lab. A second temporary UPS has been set up to regain services. If there are no more power fluctuations we will assume the older UPS was the cause and replace it with a new one. Since the UPS units in the main server room are the same model and age, we will likely have to replace them as well to prevent a campus-wide network failure.
Phishing Alert
Darla reported receiving a couple of emails that looked like they were WSU business related and supposedly had invoices attached that it asked her to open. Neither email was legitimate. So, just a reminder, if you receive something unexpected and it doesn’t explain clearly what it is about or has any of the suspect items that I’ve shown you before, don’t trust it. Forward to abuse@wsu.edu and ask them to verify if its malicious.
Security Updates
Cisco – Cisco has released several updates to address vulnerabilities affecting multiple products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
- Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning Hard-Coded Password Vulnerability cisco-sa-20180307-cpcp
- Cisco Secure Access Control System Java Deserialization Vulnerability cisco-sa-20180307-acs2
- Cisco Web Security Appliance FTP Authentication Bypass Vulnerability cisco-sa-20180307-wsa
Google – Google has released Chrome version 65.0.3325.146 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to obtain access to sensitive information. In addition to 45 security fixes (nine considered high-level), Chrome 65 also includes expanded DevTools. The updates will be available to users soon.
Campus IT Maintenace Reports
Activity Insights – Campus just set up a mailing list for users of the Digital Measures Activity Insights (AI). The email states that the list will ony be used to provide you with “important communications to AI users on the status of the system, for example planned maintenance, system slowdowns, or outages, and will not be a general email list”. If you use AI and did not recieve today’s email letting you know you are on the list you should contact provost.activity.insights@wsu.edu.
Temporary power loss to several systems – During power expansion work on a currently unused UPS, a shunt was accidentally tripped causing a different UPS to emergency power down. This tripped shunt resulted in power loss to several systems including DNS, DHCP, ITS Monitoring (Zabbix), Directory Services, RADIUS (wireless authentication), File services and some ITS-internal utilities systems. This happened just before 3 pm Tuesday, 3/6. Power was restored to all services within 5 minutes and a shunt expert will be reviewing the system before electrical work will continue.
Pullman VC infrastructure failure – Around 2:30 pm Tuesday (3/6) there was a brief outage causing communication with Pullman VC infrastructure to go down. Fortunately, the upgrades they completed at the end of the year caused everything except recordings to fail over to the Spokane bridge and DMA. As of 2:45 pm, everything was back to normal and classes relaunched on the Pullman RMX as expected. As yet, they have not reported the cause or the broader scope of what was affected. (Possibly related to the power loss reported above?)
Scheduled maintenance to the VM infrastructure – ITS will reboot and apply firmware updates to the VM infrastructure storage fabric. The work will be split over two evening sessions. The first session was last night (3/7) beginning at 8 pm ending at 4 am. The second session is tonight (3/8), same time period. No impact anticipated due to redundant service structure.
More myWSU maintenance – Oracle Managed Cloud Services performed maintenance on the myWSU Campus environment Tuesday night (8 pm – 10 pm) to update configuration settings on their web and app servers. Access to myWSU was available but end users may have experienced unexpected results or lost access requiring them to log back in to re-establish connections if they accessed myWSU during the maintenance.
Radius service maintenance – RADIUS service is the underlying infrastructure for most wireless and VPN services at WSU. It will undergo modification on 3/9 from 8 pm to 10 pm to add functionality to extend the service to WSU Extension sites. Wow, this sounds promising!
* An uninterruptible power supply, also uninterruptible power source, UPS or battery/flywheel backup, is an electrical apparatus that provides emergency power to a load when the input power source or mains power fails. Source: Wikipedia
Although UPS units used by an individual generally are low wattage and last only long enough for you to power down your computer or appliance, the ones connected to mainframes and network infrastructure are higher powered and have a much longer duration, sometimes as much as an hour or longer. The ones we have at the center were designed to last up to 90 minutes under ideal situations. Age and high usage (being triggered often) have a negative impact on battery life.