The email system may be slow this evening (Tuesday, Dec. 16th) as we are beginning to prepare for migration to a new email server for faculty and staff.  The current server has very little storage space left and the server itself is old and therefore slower than we would like it.

 

We will be making a backup copy of all the files this evening starting around 7 p.m.  It could take more than 5 hours to complete this task.  While we are copying files no email or files should be lost.

 

If all goes well tonight, we expect to move to the new email server on Thursday, December 18.  That process will start at approximately the same time and will take over 5 hours to complete.

 

Have you forgotten to logoff of Firefox on your office PC before you head to the classroom or other presentation room?  It is truly annoying to get to the classroom or presentation room and not be able to use the Firefox browser.  Although Firefox no longer supports roaming profiles and will not do so in the future, ITS has developed a solution that will at least let you use the browser in the classroom or presentation room if you forget to logoff Firefox on your office PC.  You will not have your bookmarks, but at least you can surf the network.  The new application will be called "Firefox Run Locally."

 

You will be able to access this program by going to "Start," "Utilities," and then clicking on " Firefox Run Locally."

 

Robert Burns said it well in "To a Mouse;" "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry".  And so it was with Clean Slate.  Fixing some problems led to others.  Clean Slate was installed on teaching stations on campus with two purposes in mind.  One, to ensure that the PCs were restored to their original settings when a new user logs on and two, to conserve energy by automatically shutting the computer down when it is not used for four hours.

 

As a result of these good intentions two new problems surfaced:  (1) many flash drives did not work properly on classroom PCs and (2) the wireless presenters did not work.  No longer will that be an issue as this week ITS is cleaning its slate to resolve the problems.  Starting this week ITS will be reghosting all classroom PCs and will be removing Clean Slate from the image.  Yes, that means no more troubles with flash drives, and no more problems with wireless presenters!  At least that is our hope.

 

Clean Slate will still be installed in PC labs as students are noted for notoriously downloading viruses and other software that causes other problems with standard installed software.