Posts

We will perform a cut over of logins to the Arts and Sciences domain during the weekend of 26-Dec-15.  The cut over process will take at least 48 hours to complete, and we won’t be able to predict at what time during that weekend your interactive login will disable on Chemistry and enable on the ASC domain.  Important notes about accessing computer resources:

• During the cut over, all legacy usernames, (those not of the form name.n), will change to name.n format when they are moved to ASC.  So using a made-up example, jsmith will become smith.9942.
• The process to access computers in CBC:
  • Try your  OSU name.n username and password.
  • If those credentials don’t work, your computer is still in the Chemistry domain.  In this case, you should use your Chemistry domain username and password.  Please let us know that a computer has not been moved by sending an email to support@chemistry.ohio-state.edu with subject, “Migration errors for <your name here>“.
  • If you are missing any user settings, network drives, or printers, you need to send an email to support@chemistry.ohio-state.edu with subject, “Migration errors for <your name here>“.  Please include a brief description of the problem(s) you are having, your computer name if you know it, and a time and location when and where we can find you.  Any missing files, settings, and network/printer mappings are easily recoverable with the assistance of Computer Support staff.

We will be reachable via telephone and email during most of the weekend of the 26th.  Since the core team that weekend will be three people, we will probably be offline 12:00-6:00 a.m. on both Saturday and Sunday nights.    For almost all of you, I assume that even if you are completely without internet or serviceable equipment, you can use a smart phone and request help via email to support@chemistry.ohio-state.edu.  In the event that this does not work for you, my cell phone number is 614.432.4215.  I welcome your calls or texts, but considering cell phone reception problems and possible volume of calls, it would be advisable to make this your backup option when requesting help.

(Updated by JD Wear 27-Dec-15)

About 10 days ago, construction work on 18th Ave caused damage to the network fiber that feeds several buildings on the north side of the street.  The applied fix for this damage is temporary.  OCIO wants to replace the fiber next week, with work starting late Tuesday night and continuing into early Wednesday morning.  Our entire department, including CBEC and buildings on the south side of campus, will be isolated from the campus network while OCIO replaces the fiber.  Computer Support will take all CBC computing services offline starting at 9:00 p.m. to apply pending security patches to our servers.  OCIO plans to be finished by 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, 11-Nov.

We apologize for the untimely interruption of service.  All things considered, it is much wiser to do the repair on schedule than to wait for another unplanned failure due to the damaged network fiber.

Some OSU clients have personal Box.com accounts that they think are BuckeyeBox accounts. An account of this type will have a name.n@osu.edu username, but the password is not synchronized with the corresponding OSU identity. There are a few critical limitations to having a Box account in this state, the main one being that collaboration invites from BuckeyeBox users expire after six months and have to be manually renewed. Also, there are no storage space quotas on BuckeyeBox accounts.

To migrate your current personal Box account to the OSU Enterprise BuckeyeBox without losing any of your folders/files or collaborations:

• Go to my.osu.edu, login using your OSU credentials and then select BuckeyeBox on the left. Agree to the Terms and Conditions of the service.

• Soon after you will receive an email from Box asking you to login to your personal Box account to accept the transfer of your Personal Box account to the OSU Enterprise BuckeyeBox. Follow the “please log into your Box account and accept the invitation.” link in the email to login to your personal Box account. Follow the “Forgot password?” link if you do not remember your personal Box account password. Select the “Accept” button on the top of your page.

• At his point either logout of your personal Box account by selecting the gear button at the top right and selecting “Log Out”, or you can close your internet browser.
• You now can go to box.osu.edu and select “Log In” at the top right. Login now using your OSU credentials.

Try the above first. Occasionally a person will inadvertently create a personal Box account, and then after the fact go to my.osu.edu and activate their BuckeyeBox account, but not see or recognize the email request that is generated. In a case like this, get Computer Support to help you contact OCIO so that we can force another email invite to migrate.

We need to perform off-line maintenance on computing services in CBC before the semester begins. In particular, we have just received instruction from our vendor that we must upgrade the firmware on our storage subsystems ASAP to maintain system integrity.  We will start work at 5:00 p.m. on 21-Aug-15. We will end all work by 12:00 midnight that evening, if not before. I will send out an email to all faculty, staff, and graduate students if our work is complete sooner than midnight.

We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.

Yours, JD

We need to perform off-line maintenance on computing services in CBC before the semester begins. In particular, there are a number of pending security updates for both Windows and Linux servers that must be applied.  We will start work at 5:00 p.m. on 14-Aug-15. We will end all work by 12:00 midnight that evening, if not before. I will send out an email to all faculty, staff, and graduate students if our work is complete sooner than midnight.

We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.

Yours, JD

Starting 17-Aug-15, all computer systems on the CBC LAN that cannot take regularly scheduled security updates will be moved to the CBC restricted network.*  This group of systems includes all instrument control computers that are configured to only take updates when approved by an operator at the console.

The CBC restricted network will allow for access to most services in department.  It will not allow for access to any resources, web sites, etc., outside the CBC LAN.  Instrument systems on this restricted network can be accessed by outside vendors for diagnostic purposes, but only if prior arrangements are made with Computer Support.

In most cases, you will not notice a change in service.  For example, you will still be able to save data to a CBC file server like winfs or linuxfs.  However, this networking change will make it impossible to use instrument computers for web browsing, reading email, and other tasks that require general internet access.

If you have any questions, please contact support@chemistry.ohio-state.edu.

– JD Wear, Director of Computer Support Services

*This is a university requirement for all computer systems that use campus networks.  Restricting access to unpatched systems is a valid network security measure on an open, (and therefore malware friendly), network like the CBC LAN.

CBC Computer Support continues work to prepare for the move of computers, user accounts, and services to the ASC domain.  Impacts of this move on CBC:

• Usernames on the new domain will all be of the form name.n.  To log onto a computer in CBC, long-time users will no longer use legacy formats of usernames but will instead use their OSU usernames and passwords.  E.g., instead of the username jsmith, one would use smith.4242.  This change will not affect any email aliases that users depend on.  Continuing with the example, jsmith@chemistry.ohio-state.edu will continue to work as an email address for smith.4242.
• All users of CBC computing resources will need to be either employed or enrolled at OSU, or they need to have sponsored guest access.  The form to request sponsored guest access can be found at http://ascbsc.osu.edu/forms.  As of now, the process to request access is relatively painless.
• This move will cause general service interruptions as well as interruptions to workflows for specific users and research/staff groups.  These interruptions are unavoidable, but we commit to minimizing the inconvenience to our users.
• During the next year, we will institute minimal management controls on all OSU-owned computing equipment.  All OSU-owned computing equipment will require an OSU non-cap asset tag, a desktop management client installation, and when appropriate an anti-malware software installation.

These changes will be beneficial to the department.  For example, we will have single sign-on and the end of roaming profiles on Windows systems.  At the same time, these are not discretionary changes.  CBC Computer Support is acting on college and university requirements.

(See this post for related information.)

At about 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 26-May-15, the construction crew on 18th Ave to the south of Newman & Wolfrom accidentally cut the power to NW and Evans.  The departmental server room NW2109 lost all power for about 15 minutes.  Unfortunately, we drained one of the UPS units before power was restored.

When we attempted to restart the servers in that room, a group of hosted virtual servers on two of the three virtualization hosts were unable to see their disk storage.  After several hours of work, we threw in the towel and started restoring servers to the remaining functional virtualization host.  This process is imperfect because we can only host so many servers on any given virtualization host.  So as of now we have restored essential services, but will need to work throughout the rest of the day to get back to full production capacity.

UPDATE:  26-May-15 @ 7:00 p.m.

We isolated the problem, and we were able to bring all services back online.  Details:  The UPS supporting the SAN switch ran out of battery charge before anything else in the server room.  In fact, that was the only UPS that went dead during the power outage this morning.  Two of our three ESXi boxes were in a blocked I/O state, and that state was determined by the management cluster, not by an individual host.  (Since the SAN switch went down but everything else stayed up, the management cluster was trying to protect the storage arrays on the SAN.)  Therefore, even a restart of the ESXi boxes would not fix the problem.  We needed to clear the block from the management cluster.  (Actually, we needed to re-add I/O channels to the storage arrays for those two ESXi hosts.)  When we finally learned that we needed to do this, (shout out to our recently-departed-but-still-answering-our-emails virtualization engineer Deric Crago), we were able to bring all ESXi hosts back online, and thereafter had the capacity to bring all the hosted VMs back online also.

A requirement of university data security policy is that each department identify the location and amount of sensitive data stored on university-owned servers, desktops, and laptops.  There is a lot of boilerplate in the language used for this policy, but in direct terms, we are talking about social security, BuckID, and credit card numbers.  Chemistry and Biochemistry users have no need to store any of this information, other than for personal records.  If you remember, up until about 2006, the Registrar emailed rosters with social security numbers in them.  I suspect that these old roster files are the main problem for us in this department.

CBC Computer Support will begin scanning server file systems for sensitive data starting today.  We do not expect this scanning to impact users.  However, we will be generating reports of these scans, and we will be sharing these reports with you in an effort to remove sensitive data from our systems.