Information Technology Announcements

On Friday, December 6 2013, email and network storage services for members of the Class of 2013 will end. If you haven't done so already, check out our New Alumni pages to learn how to backup your Amherst email and Userfiles (U: drive) in order to make the transition as painless as possible.

Many Amherst faculty and staff members have reported a phishing e-mail going around that asks the user to visit a suspicious link and provide their Amherst credentials. The e-mails have been coming from non-Amherst addresses. The e-mail appears as follows:

Campus Buzz wrote about how student requests have driven recent IT projects and collaborations with other departments such as Web Laundry, package notifications from the College Post Office, mobile printing for public printers with no more green sheets, Pathways Student Mentoring and the most recent project to launch - credit card deposits for AC Dollar$.

Update - September 7, 2016: As of September 7, 2016, we no longer accept deposits at Seeley Mudd.

Information Technology is very happy to announce that you can now make credit card deposits on your AC Dollar accounts.  Even better, your family and friends can make credit card deposits for you.

At http://www.amherst.edu/go/acdeposits, students log in using the first link, and family/friends log in with the second link. Funds show up in your AC Dollar$ account immediately, and the minimum deposit is $10.

Mt. Holyoke Extension will offer the January Term Course "Knowledge Management" this January 6-17, 2014, Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m - noon, for 2 credits.

Register online at www.mtholyoke.edu/extension/January (external link to mtholyoke.edu). Email extension@mtholyoke.edu or phone 413-538-3653 for more information.

Enroll in this course and learn to protect your organizational knowledge:

From: events@nercomp.org

Dear Friends,
Registration is open for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop:
“Active Learning Strategies for Large Lecture Classes!”

DATE:
Monday, December 9, 2013

TIME:
9:00 - 3:15 (Coffee and Registration start at 8:00am)

PRICE:
NERCOMP Members: $130, Non-Members: $260
Your fee includes continental breakfast and lunch.
Be sure to login to receive member prices.

Other colleges and some corporations are reporting incidents of Windows computers infected with a new type of ransomware called variously Cryptlocker, Filecoder, Crolock.A or Trojan:Win32/Crilock.A. You get this ransomware on your Windows computer by opening an email attachment that contains the program. Typically the email accompanying the attachment refers to your complaint, consumer complaint, or customer complaint. The attachment may be labeled or described in the email as containing details of the complaint resolution and/or as having compensation or refund information.

The Association of Amherst Students (AAS) recently honored the IT Department with a Proclamation of Appreciation, passed by a unanimous vote. According to President George Tepe '14, the AAS passed this proclamation, only the second of its kind, in response to IT's "many new initiatives over the past few months."

The next time you connect to the Amherst network with Amherst Secure or Eduroam you may be prompted to review a security certificate. Please feel free to read and/or accept the certificate information and then continue on to use Amherst Secure and Eduroam as normal.  The notice is legitimate, it is not malware or a virus nor is it indicating a problem with the network. IT is replacing the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates that most wireless clients use to connect to Amherst Secure and Eduroam and this change prompts you to review the new certificate information.

Beginning Monday, October 14, you will encounter a new login page when you access many IT-supplied web services, including Moodle, the Amherst website, and AC Apps. The new page, which is part of an upgrade to our authentication services, tells you exactly what you are logging into and provides links to our password-reset page and to Help Desk contact information. More importantly—and unlike the old login page—it resizes appropriately to work on smartphones and other mobile devices.

Every year for the fall semester the IT department requires that all devices (computers, smartphones, game consoles, tablets, etc.) that connect to the Amherst network register on the network. Any device not registered will be unable to access the Amherst network or the Internet. The exception is computers that connect to Ethernet ports behind the Amherst Firewall; these do not have to be registered.

On Thursday August 8 from 9 AM to Noon, the Amherst College Unix computers Romulus and Remus will be out of service while being upgraded.
 
The new systems will have 16GB of RAM and 8 CPUs, both of which can be expanded. The current CentOS 5.8 (Red Hat Linux 5.8) will be upgraded to the most recent CentOS 6.4 (Red Hat Linux 6.4).
 
The new systems and software are 64-bit. Any local code in your home directory can be recompiled to benefit from the greater precision, larger memory addressing, and wider data paths (but don’t need to be).

The College replaced the voicemail system on Monday, July 29 p.m.

Please note that voicemail messages stored on the old system did not transfer to the new system. See our instructions on how to access messages on the old system.

Some College-supplied iPads that have cellular data plans are reporting data usage errors, even though the College has unlimited plans for those devices. According to Verizon, the problem is in iOS. Here are two fixes:

1. In Settings, go to Cellular Data, then Add Data. This will connect the iPad, where the device will see that the account is an unlimited data plan. That should fix the error.

2. Turn your iPad off, then on.