Yesterday was the Equirria (festival of Mars) which is a holy day with religious and military significance (you can tell I like Roman history; probably due to my Italian heritage). Anyway, yesterday ITS felt like it was in the middle of celebrating Equirria fighting two major problems with a we will win attitude and praying to the Gods that we could resolve them.

 

At 8:30 am yesterday our email server began receiving thousands of spam emails being relayed from an ISP in France.   By 8:45 am we identified where all the spam was coming from and attempted to block the spam based on the DNS name of the offending email servers.  It did not work.  At 9:30 we blocked the spam by IP address, unfortunately we received a days worth of email in less than an hour and that literally pooped our email server out; but it kept on chugging slower and s-l-o-w-e-r and s---l---o---w---e---r, it never gave up the fight.  Then our spam filters (GWAVA digests that are delivered at 7 am and 2 pm) kicked in forcing our email server into barely breathing.  In the meantime the mail from outside of NCC was getting queued up for delivery pending the delivery of the digests. We worked on a resolution until midnight and then got some shut eye and we are now working on the problem again.

 

What that means to you.  You might not have noticed if you were at the College accessing your email.  The Webmail application was noticeably slow and at times kicked people off with an error message that said Go Away I'm Too Busy To Deal With You Now.  Normal email sent outside of NCC takes about 5 minutes to reach its destination, yesterday it ranged from 15 - 45 minutes.  No outgoing or incoming email was lost.  However, you did not receive a GWAVA digest yesterday.  In fact, the GWAVA software, as I write this, is still parsing spam emails from yesterday.  We will be working with the vendor of that software to see if we can ease its burden.  If you suspect that a legit email was blocked you can log into the qms system and release the email; the address is http://qms.noctrl.edu:49285/content/login.shtml

 

Based on this event (every one of these is a learning experience)  we have made some changes to the email system that would make the overall effect less noticeable to you.  We use a heuristic to determine if email is spam.  Previously all emails with a heuristic score above 93% were blocked and sent to you in a digest, now only emails that have a score between 93% and 96% will be sent to you (we have more confidence in the ability of our spam filter to identify spam).  Yesterday's spam had a heuristic score of 98%.  We are blocking the same amount of spam but only notifying you of the less sure spam.  If you are worried about false positives you can always visit the qms system and view all of the emails blocked by GWAVA, the URL for this is http://qms.noctrl.edu:49285/content/login.shtml and it is accessible from on and off campus.

 

Yesterday around 9:30 am the DMI listener (communication link between your PC and the Datatel database) went into a tizzy affect Colleague and Benefactor.  If you were actively trying to work in Datatel you ended up with a frozen screen.  ITS restarted the listener and things seemed to be fine.  And they were until 12:45 pm when the listener had a reoccurrence of tizziness.  It was restarted again and by 1:15 all was well.  We have not been able to determine the cause of the tizzy--probably those war gods.

 

CALL THE HELP DESK, Instead of an ITS Staff Member, WHEN YOU HAVE A PROBLEM; The phone number is X5440 and the email address is  HELPDESK@NOCTRL.EDU.  Why you ask?  ITS gets paged when there is an issue with a system and we are probably working on resolving it.  However, we do appreciate knowing when there is a problem, because at times we do not know.  The Help Desk is like a brain and it relays out the problem to appropriate ITS staff  and answers your questions regarding the problem.