IT News You Can Use - December 12

Did You Know?

All computing at The Ohio State University is governed by the Information Security Standard (ISS) and the Information Security Control Requirements (ISCR)?  A NIST standard was adapted to the university by its IT community and published by OSU’s DST (Digital Security and Trust) team.  Version 2.2.1 of the ISS and ISCR have just been published. Everyone in general, but certainly those who support their own systems, should visit the ISCR page of the cybersecurity web site for the most recent version including change notes. If you have ever wondered why your friendly ETS staff person is being strict about a security issue, it can likely be tracked back to this document.

Accessibility Tips and Tricks

Spring Semester is just around the corner.  Many are gearing up coursework for students who require accessibility accommodations. If you’ve received a message from Student Life Disability Services a student in your course requires an accommodation, please check out our NEW Accommodation page to learn next steps and some easy how-to's.

Also, join Ashley Bricker this Wednesday, December 14 from 10:00 A.M-11:00 A.M. for the Digital Accessibility Coffee Hour where she will discuss accommodation requests! Zoom link for this event can be found on the Digital Accessibility Coffee Hour event page.  

Upcoming Work

• Tuesday, December 20 between 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M., ETS will be replacing an ethernet switch in Smith Lab which provides network connectivity to room 1174. Please expect brief periods of network connectivity disruption during the replacement window. Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Tuesday, December 20 between 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. and Wednesday, December 21 between 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M.,  ETS will be performing  primary storage maintenance affecting file shares (S:\ drive) and home directories (U:\ drive). Connections to files on storage may experience brief pauses in service during the maintenance period. Storage transactions interrupted by these pauses will resume normally after a short period of time.

• Wednesday, December 21 between 5:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M., ETS will be performing core network maintenance in the Dreese data center. Central campus engineering buildings may experience brief network outages during the maintenance window. Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Wednesday, December 21 at 10:00 P.M., ETS will start the process of updates to all COE Linux systems managed by ETS. Please make sure that any Linux system you or your group uses is powered on at that time. The process runs overnight, and while the updates themselves should not cause interruptions, we recommend that you save any open documents before the update process beings. On Thursday, December 22 at 7:15 A.M., ETS will begin rebooting these systems. Please save all of your work and logoff before the reboots begin to avoid losing any unsaved work. Reboot processes will run through 9:00 A.M. If after that time you encounter any issues with a Linux system, please submit an ETS ticket at https://go.osu.edu/ets. In the ticket description, please note that it is a Linux system and include both the hostname and its location.

• Thursday, December 22 at 5:00 P.M., ETS will be rebooting some building network equipment as the last step of some required maintenance. During that time, networks may be down for several minutes as the system come back up.
  Affected locations:

• 930 Kinnear Road – 2^nd floor and rear building
• Baker Systems – 5^th floor
• Bolz Hall – 4^th floor
• DSA Snow Removal Building
• ESL
• NRL
• Pomerene – College of Engineering spaces only
• Scott Labs – 2^nd floor of East building
• Smith Labs – 5^th floor

Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Beginning Thursday, December 22 at 9:00 P.M. and lasting approximately 4 hours, ETS will be updating the Pulse VPN. Existing connections will be terminated, and the service will be unavailable during the update. This means there will be no remote connectivity into the College of Engineering networks during the update.

Please note there will be a subsequent client update for the software that runs on your computers. This update will be triggered the next time you connect to the VPN server. As part of the update, the software is being rebranded. What was formerly labeled as Pulse will now be called Ivanti. Please see the Pulse VPN help article for examples of the new visual appearance.

• Tuesday, January 3 at 11:30 P.M. and lasting about an hour, ETS will be upgrading storage server software. This update only affects data shares (S:\ drive). There is a small risk of storage connections experiencing brief pauses in service during the upgrade. Storage transactions interrupted by these pauses will resume normally after a short period of time.

• Between Wednesday, January 4 at 11:00 P.M. and Thursday, January 5 at 3:00 A.M., ETS will be performing core network maintenance. During this period there may be brief interruptions to all ETS networks. This will include all Engineering buildings on main campus, west campus, TRC and the Airport. It may also affect inbound services such as the Pulse VPN and other remote connections. Wireless networks are not affected by this work.

• Between 11:00 P.M. Thursday, January 5 and 2:00 A.M. Friday, January 6, ETS will be performing core network maintenance. During this period there may be intermittent network outages to central services including storage (S:\ and U:\ drives) and Citrix connectivity.  Wireless networks are not affected by this work.