We’re experiencing some issues with our C3PO server – currently the course catalog is also down because of this! We’re are going to restart C3PO at noon to fix these issues.

- The Help Desk

The website was in working order last night by 7:00pm – however, in order to fix the problems we ended up restoring from Monday night’s backup.  If you made any changes to a website on the “windu2” server between appx. 7:00pm Monday night (7/19) and 7:00pm Tuesday night (7/20), they have been undone by this restore.

If the changes were simple and basic, we recommend simply making them again today – if they were significant, give the Help Desk a call at x6449 and we will do our best to reclaim those changes and copy the files over.

We’re currently experiencing an issue with many CC websites – you’ll notice it as a prompt asking for a username and password when you try to get to a page.  In most cases you can bypass this by clicking cancel multiple times.  The page will then load, though often it will be missing a few images and the formatting of the page will look funny.

We have a fix planned for this issue, but it involves up to 2 hours of downtime so we are going to wait and do the fix this evening at 5:00pm (so the site will be down after 5:00pm and up to 7:00pm).

Many of you have noticed messages reporting delivery delays or failure to send emails today – the errors don’t specify which messages were delayed or failed to send.  Most messages are going through without problems, so this is not happening to everyone or with every message, only some.

This problem is a further repercussion of the phishing scam and subsequent spamming which happened recently, and we are going to do some work on the email servers overnight which should fix the problem.

 Messages which have been delayed or failed to send are currently saved in a queue on the server and will go out as soon as the problem is cleared up (likely late tonight), so you need not worry about them having disappeared into the ether.

Let us know if you have any questions – if the problem has not been fixed overnight, we’ll update you in the morning. 

~ Your Help Desk Staff, x6449, Tutt Library 13

We found an issue with our DHCP server that was causing all of our networking woes this morning! This has been fixed and we should all be good to go!

Let us know if there are any other issues as we would be glad to help!

As many of you have noticed, we’re experiencing a network outage this morning in certain parts of campus (the problem seems to be in parts of Palmer and nearby buildings such as the Library) – we’re working on the issue and will let you know when it’s resolved.

We wanted to let you know that some work is being done over the next few weeks on our telephone equipment to prepare for an upgrade in August.  Most likely you will not notice any effect at all as a result.

However, it is possible that you might try to make a call while work is being done on your line.  If you pick up your phone and hear no dial tone, it’s probably because your line is being worked on.  If that does happen, the effect should last no more than 1 minute at the most.

This work will be ongoing for the next 3 weeks, ending on Friday, 7/16 (if you do notice a lack of dial tone on your phone for 1 minute, it will only happen once during that window of time).

Each year the Help Desk creates a file you can import into your Outlook calendar that includes important CC dates for the upcoming year (when blocks start and end, when timesheets are due, IT maintenance days and electronic recycling days, winter and spring breaks, etc.

The file for 2010-2011 is finished and available for you to import using the instructions here: http://helpdesk.coloradocollege.edu/index.php/tips-and-how-to/email/add-important-cc-dates/

Note that this process must be done using Outlook on a PC – if you use a Macintosh with Entourage or check your email via the CC website, you’ll need to log into a PC and use Outlook one time in order to import the file with the dates.

Let us know if you have any questions!

After a lot of troubleshooting and speaking with our wireless vendor (Aruba), we’ve pinpointed a bug in the system and will be taking the wireless networks (tigernet2 and ccguest) down at 11:00 am today to apply a patch that should fix the problem people have been having over the past week with frequently getting disconnected from wireless.

Signal strength issues will still occur due to the reasons we said before (unplugged access points and signal interference), but this fix should help considerably.

The downtime will be no longer than 30 minutes, and likely less than that.

Thanks for your patience, and remember once again that you can always use an Ethernet cable when suffering from wireless woes!

We’d like to acknowledge the issues many of you have seen with our wireless networks (tigernet2 and ccguest), particularly within the last week or so.

Specifically, we’re looking into the problem where often the connection simply drops and then comes back over and over again in short intervals.

So far, the problems we’ve found have only been an exacerbation of problems with the wireless network in general.  Namely, the two biggest issues with tigernet2 and ccguest are:

Signal interference from other wireless networks.  This comes in 2 varieties:

1) (big deal) Interference from “rogue access points” on campus.  When people try to create their own wireless networks by plugging in a wireless router into our Ethernet or other similar methods, that wireless network causes massive radio interference in the area, to the point where signal quality degrades so much that you can’t even stay connected.  If you notice a list of other networks you can connect to (we saw at least 3 of them on the west side of campus this morning, for example), chances are good that they are causing a lot of your connectivity woes.

2) (smaller deal) Interference from nearby but off campus networks, such as home or business wi-fi in the vicinity.  There are currently 170+ of these networks around us, all of which are degrading the signal at the edges of campus.  Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about these.

Unplugged wireless APs

Our wireless network consists of more than 500 access points across campus.  At any given time, roughly 80 of these are not functioning, and when we go to check on them it is almost always because they are unplugged.  Especially when several in a certain area are all unplugged, this causes severe connectivity issues in that area.  We address these as we can, but the best way to help is to make sure you don’t unplug any of the access points (they are small gray boxes with what look like bunny ears, and are usually mounted on the ceiling or high up on a wall – if there are no blinking green lights, something is wrong and the AP is probably unplugged).

We’re continuing to look into the current issues since they are more severe than usual, but wanted to let you know about these ongoing problems and how you can help us to minimize them.

When in your rooms or offices, we’d highly recommend plugging into Ethernet – it’s a faster, more stable connection, and cables cost less than $10.