This Friday, 5/17, we will be applying a required update to eCommon which will add stability to the back-end processes. eCommon will be briefly unavailable while this update is applied, beginning at 8:30 AM. Service should be restored by approximately 9AM.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Another part of the evolving Emerson IT 2.0 story is our new set of core values and our mission and vision statements. We’ve recently finalized these and we’re very proud to put them out for the public to see. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to use the feedback form available here: http://it.emerson.edu/feedback/.
Our core values are what we stand for, and act as unifying principles for our mission and vision statements. They are:
Emerson IT supports the College through friendly, responsive, and proactive service to the community. We enable the institution to pursue its mission by providing reliable, up-to-date systems and tools, creating avenues for innovation and growth.
Emerson IT strives to be a trusted and collaborative partner in the development of creative, intuitive, and sustainable technology solutions, fostering communication and learning across our global campus.
It’s an exciting time over here in Information Technology. We are currently going through some major changes, both culturally and structurally. Now that it’s finalizing a bit, here’s part one of this story, which outlines how IT staff are currently organized. This structure is still shifting, and should generally be considered a work in progress, but we wanted to outline our most up-to-date information and share it with the community. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to use the feedback form available here: http://it.emerson.edu/feedback/.
The Vice President of Information Technology is William Gilligan, and the senior administrative assistant is Mary Timmons.
The User Services department includes the Help Desk, Lab Operations, and Media Services teams. They provide front-end support to the college, as well as maintain classroom spaces, mediated areas, and computer labs. The Director of User Services is Bret Kulakovich.
The Help Desk team includes:
The Lab Operations team includes:
The Media Services team includes:
The Infrastructure department includes the Networking & Systems and Telecommunications teams. They support the vast majority of Emerson servers, networks, and phones. The Networking & Systems team includes:
The Telecommunications team includes:
The Enterprise Systems team takes care of large-scale campus-wide systems like Banner, which includes subset systems like INB, SSB, ODS, Cognos, etc. The ERP team includes:
ITG remains relatively unchanged, structure-wise. They still work with faculty on their technology needs and they support Canvas, Google Apps, Median, among teaching-related systems. ITG includes:
In January of 2010, Emerson enacted a new password policy that detailed specific and strict password strength requirements, as well as mandatory password expiration every 120 days. This is the policy that Emerson still has in place today.
We here at Emerson IT would like to propose an alternative policy. We’ve listened to your comments about the current policy and have come up with something that might be a little better. Randall Munroe at XKCD proposes the idea of passphrases instead of passwords, an idea that’s been around and debated for quite some time. Take a look at this:
XKCD #936: A webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language.
Yes! But don’t worry, we’re not expecting you to think up 12 character passwords that have at least a capital letter, a lowercase letter, start with a character, end with a number, etc.
This is where passphrases come in.
Password strength is generally qualified in terms of how long it would take a computer to crack it, and under most circumstances, longer is better. The longer your password is, the more possible combinations there are for a computer to try, and it becomes virtually impossible to crack in any reasonable amount of time.
It’s more than just length that makes a passphrase strong. One of the core recommendations in creating passwords is to avoid dictionary words. When we add length, words become unavoidable; you’re not going to remember a 12 character string of letters without it making some sort of sense to you. The important detail is to use random words. For example:
The combinations are endless, of course. As shown above, you can add CAPS and spaces to help make the end product somewhat more random. Know some words in a foreign language? Throw those in too. Throw in a website address. Your favorite movie villains.
Using this method is much easier because you can make the passphrase whatever you want, and make it something you’ll remember.
One of the most frequent comments we’ve heard about our password requirements is that your Emerson email is too unimportant to be a target for password hacking, so why do our requirements have to be so strict? But think for a moment about all of the various things that your password grants access to:
Remember that your password isn’t just for your email – it grants access to a lot of other sensitive material! It’s also a very common method for phishing to attack accounts that people don’t necessarily consider important, and use those accounts to break into bigger accounts. Periodically changing your password is still a good idea, and we’ll remind you of that, but you wouldn’t be forced to change it anymore with this plan.
We want your feedback – would this make it easier to manage your password? Do you understand how this keeps your accounts secure? Do you have other suggestions or questions?
Please complete this short survey about the proposed changes to let us know how you feel!
ECmail will be unavailable for approximately a half-hour tonight beginning at 10pm while we apply a small but critical security update to our mail system. While you will be unable to check your ECmail during this time, any emails sent to you will still be delivered to your inbox.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We wish you a good Friday night otherwise!
In the very early morning of Friday, March 15th, various sensors around the IT datacenter began sending out emergency notifications to IT and Facilities staff about temperature limits being exceeded. By 12:15AM, IT’s Systems & Networking Technician Dan Leich was in his car on his way to campus, and the other Systems & Networking staff were communicating via phone calls and text messages. Around 12:30 AM, Dan walked into Emerson’s central datacenter and got a nice face-full of 110-degree air. The two HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) units, built to redundantly maintain a certain temperature and humidity in the room, had both failed. Soon, the IT staff gathered in an IRC chatroom, discussing the best way to proceed. They were soon joined by several other IT staff to help coordinate outside communication.
The datacenter’s HVAC system is built to be redundant. The HVACs are even smart enough to use outside air if it’s cold out, saving electricity. There’s two of pretty much everything, so that if one component fails, there’s an immediate backup. The system periodically switches between the two units to make sure they’re both working. On one such switchover event on Thursday night, the unit being switched to did not function properly, but because of a failed pump the system did not “failover” correctly to its backup. Instead, the whole system shut down, leaving the datacenter with no ventilation.
From home, IT staff began turning off every system they could to help reduce the amount of heat being generated in the room. By 2:30AM, every non-essential system was offline, and Facilities set up a portable AC unit, but the temperature only dipped to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. At this point it was clear to Facilities staff that something major had failed on the roof, where the HVAC system took in air. Our third party HVAC technicians were at least an hour away, so IT staff began shutting down every essential system except for DHCP, DNS, ECWireless, and the internet connection.
By the end of the shutdown process, IT had turned off every storage array, every physical system, and three of the four Virtual Machine host servers. The only equipment left powered on were one VM host for DNS and DHCP, the ECWireless controllers, and the physical routing gear for the internet connection. Dan, being the IT staff present on site, had to physically unplug several systems that could not be turned off remotely. The temperature spiked again at 110 degrees Fahrenheit despite these efforts.
Luckily, our outside vendor technicians arrived on site around 2:30AM and diagnosed the problem. They manually re-engaged the backup HVAC, which began cooling the datacenter. By 4:00AM, the temperature was 85 degrees, an acceptable level to begin turning things back on. Turning things off in the right sequence is difficult, but turning them on can be even more dangerous.
Fortunately, there were no major failures while turning equipment back on. A few failed hard drives here and there, and a couple of grumpy pieces of hardware, but nothing catastrophic. Most every system was back up and reinitialized in the proper order by 5:30AM. Best of all, at no time was “the internet” disrupted, so there were no reports from students in the dorms about any problems. The off-and-on-again procedure followed by the IT staff was efficient and exemplified great teamwork, especially given that everyone (except Dan) was working from home, coordinating their efforts through an IRC chatroom. At the time of this writing, our HVAC redundancy has been restored, and everything is back to normal.
We are currently researching moving some, if not all, of our datacenter to a more secure, managed location, so this type of catastrophe never happens again. We are also working to leverage current external solutions like our new campus in LA and Amazon Web Services to further protect our systems and add redundancy.
Just another day in IT.
Tomorrow night (Friday 3/22) at 8pm, we will be refreshing the system that runs eCommon. This means it will be unavailable for about a half-hour. This is one of many steps we take each semester to help ensure that registration goes as smoothly as possible.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. In the meantime, have a great Friday night!
Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, eCommon and Banner will be unavailable this Friday, 3/15 at 5:00 pm through Sunday, 3/17 at 8:00 pm. We apologize for the inconvenience.
If you have any questions, please contact the I.T. Help Desk at x8080 or at helpdesk@emerson.edu
Early this morning, some Emersonians received an email from a “Lennon, Brian” claiming that their password would expire in 48 hours. The email included a link purportedly for account validation, and is similar to a message we discussed last month.
This email is a phishing scam: do not click on the link or enter any information into the form.
If you have already done so, it is imperative that you contact the I.T. Help Desk as soon as possible to have your password reset.
As a reminder, all official communications regarding your password come from helpdesk@emerson.edu. When your password is due to expire, you change it at http://password.emerson.edu.
As a general policy, exercise caution with suspicious emails. For example, the message yesterday was sent from @kleinisd, not @emerson.edu. If it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t! Don’t be afraid to contact the I.T. Help Desk to be sure, at 617-824-8080 or helpdesk@emerson.edu.
The Emerson Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a service that allows Emerson staff and faculty to access their Cabinet folders (and other internal-network-only services) from off-campus. The VPN we were using has gotten quite old and has to be sent to a farm upstate. We’ve replaced it with a new VPN which is not only more reliable, but offers better security benefits as well.
While this is good news, it also means a change for those of you who had been using the old VPN: you will have to delete the old connection settings and configure your computer to connect to the new VPN. Detailed instructions on how to do this are at http://www.emerson.edu/about-emerson/offices-departments/help-desk/guides/vpn.
The old VPN will be shut down on March 31, so you will need to take these steps before then in order to continue connecting.
If you have any questions about setting up this new VPN, please call the IT Help Desk at 617-824-8080 or email helpdesk@emerson.edu, and we will gladly help you out.
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