Users may have received a phishing attempt to their CS e-mail account. The subject may be \”Account Login Alert!\” or \”Princeton Security\”.

Please be aware that there seems to be a coordinated spear-phishing campaign targeting the CS Department. Various e-mails are being delivered to accounts making assorted claims from improper password use to free money or local news and events.

Remember to always exercise caution with e-mail and web sites. These messages prey on your inattention in order to steal your credentials and use them for various nefarious purposes. DO NOT CLICK SUSPICIOUS LINKS, and DO NOT TYPE YOUR USERNAME OR PASSWORD on any site that you are not 100% sure belongs to the CS Department.

If you are not sure, please feel free to forward suspicious messages to CS Staff (including full headers if you can) and we can verify whether or not the message is valid.

If you may have compromised your account, contact CS Staff

If you need any additional assistance, please contact the CS Staff at any time.

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department or campus network or computing infrastructure, including, but not limited to, e-mail, web service, and public login hosts.

What is happening:
During this window, OIT will be performing maintenance on the campus network, resulting in no network service outside the CS network. This outage will include internet service and wireless service all over campus.

Also during this time, the CS linux servers will be patched and rebooted. The penguins (tux, opus) and cycles (soak, wash, rinse, and spin) hosts will be reinstalled.

SPECIAL NOTE: As we are reinstalling the penguins and cycles login servers, all crontabs will be deleted. You will need to back up your crontabs before the downtime, and put them back after.

Why is it happening:
This is part of regular maintenance to keep systems up-to-date.

This is a reschedule of the secondary tasks of an outage originally scheduled for November 27, 2013, and cancelled due to unscheduled and unrelated problems.

Who is affected:
All users of CS Department wired networks, including network users in the CS Building, 221 Nassau St., Sherrerd Hall, Friend Center, and 151 Forrestal Road (the HPCRC).

This outage will also affect the OIT wireless network ONLY in the CS Building.

Actual outages are expected to be much shorter than the full window, but outages local to any particular location will occur at various times throughout the window for 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

What is happening:
During this time, several network switches will be updated to newer versions of their operating systems.

Why is it happening:
The switch software updates will address a few minor bugs which have come up lately, including performance-limiting bugs.

This is a reschedule of an outage originally scheduled for November 27, 2013, and cancelled due to unscheduled and unrelated problems.

Who is affected:
All users of CS Department wired networks, including network users in the CS Building, 221 Nassau St, Sherrerd Hall, Friend Center, and 151 Forrestal Road (the HPCRC).

This outage will also affect the OIT wireless network ONLY in the CS Building.

What is happening:
During this time, the Department\’s network uplink (to the main campus, and onward to the greater Internet) will be upgraded from its current 1Gbps link to a 10Gbps link.

Why is it happening:
The campus uplink upgrade will enable greater opportunities for collaboration by increasing the rate at which data can be moved across the network. This will enable high-speed data transfer between CS Department systems and systems in other departments on campus and, in some circumstances, other remote locations.

Both of the CS LDAP authentication servers went down this morning due to hardware failure. The LDAP servers provide authentication for e-mail, SSH access to public CS servers, and the CS file system. We are working to restore the servers. We currently don\’t have a time when the service will be restored. Updates will be posted to this site as we make progress repairing the servers.

8:30 AM Update – The servers are now booting again and we are working to restore the LDAP software and the LDAP database.

9:20 AM Update – The LDAP software is now working and we are working on restoring the LDAP database.

10:20 AM Update – The LDAP database has been restored from an older version dating back to September. We are trying to update to the latest backup from last night.

11:11 AM Update – We were unsuccessful in restoring to a later version of the LDAP database. If you created a CS account or changed your password after September 24, 2013, you will need to contact CS Staff to update your password.

Due to a failure of our LDAP servers, the work announced below has been postponed to Tuesday, December 10, 2013, from 7:30am-8:00am (10 Gb/sec link) and Thursday, December 19, 2013, from 6:30am-8:30am (switch updates).

Who is affected:
All users of CS Department wired networks, including network users in the CS Building, 221 Nassau St, Sherrerd Hall, Friend Center, and 151 Forrestal Road (the HPCRC).

This outage will also affect the OIT wireless network ONLY in the CS Building.

What is happening:
During this time, the Department\’s network uplink (to the main campus, and onward to the greater internet) will be upgraded from its current 1Gbps link to a 10Gbps link.

Also during this downtime, several network switches will be updated to newer versions of their operating systems.

Actual outages are expected to be much shorter than the full window, but outages local to any particular location will occur at various times throughout the window for 5 to 10 minutes at a time.

Why is it happening:
The campus uplink upgrade will enable greater opportunities for collaboration by increasing the rate at which data can be moved across the network. This will enable high-speed data transfer between CS Department systems and systems in other departments on campus and, in some circumstances, other remote locations.

The switch software updates will address a few minor bugs which have come up lately.

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department wired network or network services (including e-mail, web service, etc.)

What is happening:
Our core network router will be patched and rebooted to address a bug in its operating system that is causing some minor connectivity issues. During this maintenance, all traffic between CS subnets will be interrupted. Existing TCP connections may be disconnected.

Actual network downtime is expected to be on the order of 10-15 minutes, but a full hour has been scheduled in case of unexpected trouble.

Why is it happening:
As mentioned above, a router bug is causing some minor connectivity problems. We hope to address the problem before it becomes more widespread or causes bigger issues.

This maintenance is the work rescheduled from July 25, 2013.

Who is affected:
Potentially, all users of CS Department computing and storage infrastructure.

What is happening:
On Thursday, the storage cluster that provides file service for all CS Department public services will undergo upgrades to its network interfaces.

During this maintenance, connections to Samba/CIFS file shares will experience occasional, temporary interruptions. Users may need to re-establish connections to the file share in some cases.

We DO NOT anticipate actual downtime for other services, but since all maintenance involves the risk of broader problems, this announcement serves as a heads-up. In the event of problems with this maintenance, impacts could range up to outages of ALL CS Department public services that rely on the storage cluster (file service, public login hosts, e-mail, web service, etc). Note that wired and wireless networking connectivity will not be affected.

Why is it happening:
This upgrade will provide 10Gbit network connectivity to our storage cluster, getting us one step closer to end-to-end 10Gbit capability for our services.

Update – 14:12 – The upgrade has run into some issues that are resulting in some services being slow to respond or unavailable. We apologize for the trouble, but are working with the vendor presently to get things back in full working order.

Update – 16:40 – All services should be back to normal operation now. Please contact CS Staff if you continue to have problems.

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Network

What is happening:
The Department\’s primary border firewall will be replaced with a new firewall device. During the replacement, connections from the CS Department to the main campus, the internet, or to portions of the CS Department network which are outside our firewall, will be interrupted. However, as OIT will also be performing router maintenance between 05:00 and 07:00 (see earlier announcement), we don\’t anticipate this work causing much additional impact.

Why is it happening:
This is the second step of our three-step process to provide 10Gbps networking from our network core out to the main campus, and, by extension, the internet. This upgrade will give our firewall the internal capacity to support 10Gbps connections.

Due to technical complications, the decision was made to postpone the work in order to minimize the risk of problems. Those issues having been worked out, we have rescheduled this maintenance for Monday, August 12, 2013.

Who is affected:
Potentially, all users of CS Department computing and storage infrastructure.

What is happening:
On Thursday, the storage cluster that provides file service for all CS Department public services will undergo upgrades to its network interfaces.

During this maintenance, connections to Samba/CIFS file shares will experience occasional, temporary interruptions. Users may need to re-establish connections to the file share in some cases.

We DO NOT anticipate actual downtime for other services, but since all maintenance involves the risk of broader problems, this announcement serves as a heads-up. In the event of problems with this maintenance, impacts could range up to outages of ALL CS Department public services that rely on the storage cluster (file service, public login hosts, e-mail, web service, etc). Note that wired and wireless networking connectivity will not be affected.

Why is it happening:
This upgrade will provide 10Gbit network connectivity to our storage cluster, getting us one step closer to end-to-end 10Gbit capability for our services.