News

What is happening? Remaining on-premises shared and generic Connect accounts (excluding those in Computer Science) will be migrated to Microsoft 365 by the end of July 2022.

What do I need to do? 

• Department and Faculty IT contacts and IST Account Reps will receive email communication about this work, including a list of accounts, migration dates, and action items, approximately three or four weeks before the migration date.
• Shared and generic Connect accounts will receive email communication about this work approximately two weeks before the migration date, and a reminder 1-2 days before the account is migrated. 
• Communications will outline the post-migration steps and link to necessary support resources. 

What is happening? On Thursday, June 2, Atlassian identified a critical security vulnerability for on-premises Confluence Servers and Confluence Data Centre. In order to protect Waterloo's instance of this service from exploitation, the IST security team has implemented a firewall block.

What is happening? Microsoft is phasing out Internet Explorer (IE) 11. 

When is this happening? This work will begin Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

What do Internet Explorer users need to do? These users should switch to another supported Windows browser such as Microsoft Edge, Chrome, or Firefox before June 15, 2022.

Resolved: As a result of a hardware failure, this morning wireless connectivity and services within our data centre were interrupted.

The failed hardware has been restored and all additional services that were affected by the outage have been restored.

While most services were restored before noon, some email services were not restored until 3:00 pm. Users may receive a high volume of emails as queued emails are delivered

What is happening? Information Systems & Technology (IST) has scheduled an emergency maintenance window to replace a storage shell that has a failure.

When is this happening? Saturday, June 4 from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m.

Which services will be impacted? The below services will be impacted. These are mapped drives that may exist on your device or server. During this outage, any drive mappings to these shared directories will not be accessible:

All Magneto SMB shares:

What is happening? We will be testing the University’s campus-wide emergency communication system.

When is this happening? Tuesday, May 17 at 2:00 p.m.                                             

What is the impact? Emergency communication channels being tested include:

A message from the Mass Email Management project sponsors
 

Resolved: The cause of this issue has been identified as a configuration error, during scheduled maintenance, to replace a database server, which resulted in the database going offline at a later time. The root cause of the configuration error has been corrected. IST has made some interim improvements such that the system will fail safe in the event of a future database outage.

Resolved: Full service has been restored within Quest and all users should be able to log in and work within the system as normal. Information Systems & Technology is coordinating an incident report that will be shared with appropriate stakeholders, including follow-up with the vendor and lessons learned.

Update [5:07 p.m. April 12]:

The winter 2022 issue of the IST Newsletter is now available! Learn more about how we’re implementing integrated collaborative IT in campus spaces; read about the recent increase in 2FA attacks and how to protect yourself; the WCMS 3 project team shares an update; the Green IT Committee is back; and more!