11-Sep-2017

Some central services unvailable on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2017

From 10:00 AM until about 2 PM on Tuesday, 12-Sep-2017, some central CLASSE services that require CLASSE authentication (such as the Password Change Manager) will be unavailable while we upgrade one of the Lab's three Windows Active Directory Domain controllers. This outage will not affect CLASSE websites, computer logins, email, printing, or Samba.

The central CLASSE authentication service is in the process of being migrated to the latest version of Active Directory. DC1, the first of the three redundant Domain Controllers, will be updated on Tuesday, 12-Sept-2017. This will cause a temporary outage for those few third party tools (like Password Change Manager, the password reset web page) which do not automatically fail-over to one of the redundant servers. Logins to CLASSE Windows, Apple or Linux computers should be unaffected.

Printing unavailable from Noon - 1PM Tuesday

Most CLASSE printers will be unavailable from Noon to 1PM Tuesday, 12-Sep-2017, while we upgrade our central print server.

Don't "Sign in" to Word, Excel and other Office 2016 products

Many Office 2016 products claim "Sign in to get the most out of Office" in their initial windows. Don't waste your time trying to do it.

That "Sign in" has nothing to do with the Office 2016 products installed on CLASSE managed computers. Instead, it's a way to access some of Microsoft's cloud-based services, none of which are used by CLASSE.

However, you can "Sign in" to Cornell's centralized subscription to Microsoft's Office365 cloud-based services by using OWA at http://outlook.cornell.edu/ Then, to access Yammer and other O365 services, select (click on) "Office 365" at the upper left. WARNING do NOT select the options "Install Office 2016" or "Other installs."

Upcoming Change to Staff Email and Office 365

At the direction of the university's IT Governance Council, CIT is preparing to make a change to handling of Office 365 email. Mail will be routed directly to Office 365 and no longer pass through Cornell's infrastructure. The change has already been made for CIT, and will be applied to other Cornell units in the coming months. Instead of using Who I Am to specify mail forwarding, it will be set in Office 365. This change includes people forwarding to Cmail. Spam and junk mail filtering will be done by Microsoft's systems, rather than Cornell's. For details, see: https://it.cornell.edu/news/upcoming-change-staff-email-and-office-365/20170829

Watch Out for Hurricane Relief Scams

See https://it.cornell.edu/news/watch-out-hurricane-harvey-relief-scams/20170829

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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