December 12, 2011

Today's topics:

Printing Transparencies

If you need to print transparencies, please contact Bill Brangan, who will put them in the printer for you. The plastic sheets are relatively expensive, and more than a box of them has been wasted in the past few weeks because many people have been printing them by accident.

PDF Virus

Warning: Do not open PDF documents which you receive unexpectedly, even when they seem to be from people you know.

Many people at Cornell have been receiving an e-mail attachment borne virus that attempts to exploit a security defect in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. It arrives as a small PDF attachment that, when opened, will promptly look for local e-mail address books and begin spamming -- including sending itself to all of those addresses. Adobe has not yet provided a patch, and there have been so many variants in the past few days that the anti-virus scanners have not been able to keep up.

For more information, see the CIT announcement at http://www.it.cornell.edu/security/alerts.cfm

Holiday scams

As usual, criminals are hoping you'll fall for their seasonal ripoffs. Holiday travel scams are quite popular. For more information, see http://www.it.cornell.edu/news/story.cfm?customel_datapageID_1942=205603

Symantec Anti-Virus for MacOS X 10.7 (Lion)

(From a CIT notice)

Symantec has released a version of its Endpoint Protection antivirus software that is supported for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Anyone running Lion on their personally-owned computer should install the new client, because the security built in to OS X protects only the computer it is running on while Symantec Endpoint Protection also has features to protect the broader Cornell computing environment.

The installer for the Lion-supported version (v12.1, RU 1) may be downloaded from: http://cufs.cit.cornell.edu/software/mac/SymantecEndpointProtection12_1_RU1.dmg

This new version of SEP will be installed on LEPP-managed computers when the centrally-managed version becomes available, which should be in the next few weeks.

Scientific Linux 6

LEPP has begun deploying Scientific Linux 6 where appropriate. All SL6 deployments will be 64-bit. During this transition period, please be mindful of what code you build where. The best way to ensure you are building on an appropriate system is to use any central servers that are dedicated as build nodes for your project.

LNX6212 is available remotely as a public SL6 system, and lnx4200 is running SL6 in the Wilson Public Terminal Room.

Additional information will be sent as this transition progresses. For initial notes on SL6 and transitioning to 64-bit, please see:

• https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/ScientificLinux6
• https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/Lnx64Bit

For help finding which computer is appropriate for your use, please see:

• https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/WhichComputer

Evince - PDF Viewer on Linux

Due to ongoing security issues with Acrobat Reader, performance and memory issues, Adobe's lack of adequate support for Linux, and the overhead required to maintain acroread on Linux, we will remove acroread from all SL5 and SL6 systems. All SL5 and SL6 users should use evince to view PDF and Postscript documents. If you really need to use Adobe Acrobat for some reason, it's available on the Windows Application Server. For more information, see https://wiki.lepp.cornell.edu/lepp/bin/view/Computing/WindowsRemoteDesktopServers

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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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