C&CZ Problem Card

The last few days three Science users have supplied their Science password to phishers. We notice that because Internet criminals use these passwords to get into the Science mail servers (horde webmail, smtp) in order to send spam. This time they even used a fake copy of the horde Science webmail website. The big differences with the real horde Science webmail website are: the URL is not within science.ru.nl the connection is not a secure https connection, there is no lock the username and password do not arrive at C&CZ servers, but in the hands of Internet criminals. PLEASE: do not naively click on a link in an e-mail!

On Monday, January 28th 2013 at 8:00 am, one of the servers that is being used by the wireless network of the RU, will be replaced. This replacement will affect you as a user of the wireless networks ru-wlan and eduroam: There will appear a new certificate when connecting. You can just accept this, after which the connection should work. If this appears not to be the case, then it’s best that you remove your old Eduroam- respectively your old RU-WLAN settings first to activate the new connection . ...

Because the file server crashed, it had to be rebooted.

Older Fedora desktop PC’s may experience startup problems after an upgrade of one of our LDAP servers. A fix is available and has been applied. If you still encounter this problem, please contact C&CZ.

Horde webmail again appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to phishers/spammers. After first stopping horde, early Friday morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde. Saturday morning it appeared that this short spam-outbreak had caused administrators of hotmail.com to add our mail server to their blacklist. Therefore we switched the IP-number of this mail server Saturday morning.

Because the file server refuses to accept a spare disk, it needs a reboot.

At the moment, we are solving the problem.

During the night of wednesday on thursday a power outage resulted in a network outage in the basement computing facilities. The power was restored to the network equipment using a bypass thus circumventing the UPS at about 09:15. Further checks implied that most servers had not become powerless so that most services became automatically available again. Network drivers on “bundle” had to be restarted in order to get access to home directories for a large number of users. Furthermore, several websites had to be restarted which made it possible for PC’s to boot properly. During the day, an unrelated issue with the RAID storage of “plus” has been fixed as well granting access to the following network shares: sofie, ams*, molchem, mb*, encapson, milkun4, snn, neuropi, digicd. carta, … Since wireless devices were unable to acquire IP addresses, i.e. gain access to the network, a split-brain situation was diagnosed within the DHCP service which was resolved around 13:00.

Next Friday morning, the home server “pile” will be rebooted. There are problems with the snapshots, which could make a reboot take more time. Therefore we schedule the reboot for early next Friday.

Yesterday evening, horde webmail appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to spammers. First we stopped horde. This morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde.