Increased traffic limits in QoS

Because we have 500Mbps available via Charter, I increased the QoS settings on the Palo Alto a bit just to see if we were really artificially capping our usage, and if the PA could handle more. 

I didn't max it out, just put it up to around 300.

I'll keep an eye on the graphs, but just wanted you to know in case something weird happens.

Phone outage for OMS, BKE, RCI, OASIS and OHS today 4:00 - 4:30

In order to replace a malfunctioning component of one of the district's phone switches, there will be an outage from approximately 4:00 - 4:30 PM on Monday, November 10, 2014. This should affect only Oregon High School, Oregon Middle School, OASIS, Brooklyn Elementary, and Rome Corners Intermediate.

Netherwood Knoll, Prairie View, the District Services Office, and the Oregon Pool should continue to have uninterrupted phone service.

As with all things technological, there is the possibility that the outage will last longer than planned due to unforeseen events.

website outage schedule for Nov. 21-22

In order to perform maintenance upgrades, the www.OregonSD.org public website will be unavailable as described below.

Friday, November 21st
8:00 pm - 1:00 am: www.OregonSD.org will be unavailable. 

Saturday, November 22nd 
www.OregonSD.org will be available in read-only mode, with possible momentary service interruptions to either certain components or to the entire site. 

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

Destiny unavailable June 6, 2014 at 10 PM for upgrade

An update to your Destiny 12.0 will occur June 6, 2014 at 10 p.m. CST

. As a result, Destiny will not be available for a period of two hours. Once updated, you can start using these amazing features right away.

Destiny Textbook ManagerManage and distribute textbooks using barcodes, by quantities only or use both methods!

• Add quantities of textbooks into inventory
• Circulate by ISBN barcode; enabling pull-up textbook lists for easier check-out
• Easier check-in of books without barcodes
• Simplified quantity movement – ordering,
  transferring and reporting – district wide

Destiny Library Manager

• Ability to see the "who" and "where" of a transaction in the Copy Transaction report
• Display of blocked messages in the Copy Transaction report, enabling a user to see if an update is complete/incomplete, or spot an error message

Google Drive unavailable

No, it's not just you. Google Drive is unavailable for many, if not all, users. I called Google and they are aware of the issue and are working to restore service. No ETA on a solution yet. My advice is to just check back occasionally, although we will let you know if we receive any updates.

Sorry for this happening, especially at this critical time of year.

Update from Google:
The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

June 4, 2014 9:29:00 AM PDT

Especially for seniors- How to take your Google Apps data with you

As this year's Senior class prepares to graduate and move on to bigger and better things, we want to make sure that they can take all their hard work with them to college or work. Most student data is stored in Google Apps for Education in the oregonsd.net domain. If you have documents or files stored on the network server, you can copy it directly to Google Drive.

Students can export their data directly from Google Drive (directions here), but there are also tools to automatically move all the contents of a Google Apps account to another Google account. For example, a student could move their documents, gmail, calendar items, and websites from student.sample@oregonsd.net  to a new personal account such as mynewaccount@gmail.com, or to their new university email address.

One tool to do this is Backupify's Migrator, available at https://www.backupify.com/free-tools/migrator-google-apps

Another is Google Takeout from the Data Liberation Front.

We (the OSD IT department) don't own these tools, so we really can't support them, but wanted to let you know they exist. Best wishes to the Seniors!

Don't use Internet Explorer

Microsoft Security Advisory 2963983 (CVE-2014-1776) is a serious Vulnerability in the Internet Explorer web browser that could Allow Remote Code Execution. Microsoft is aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 10, and Internet Explorer 11.

The vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability. The vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated. The vulnerability may corrupt memory in a way that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user within Internet Explorer. An attacker could host a specially-crafted website that is designed to exploit this vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website.

For more information on Microsoft Security Vulnerability 2963983, please visit:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/2963983.aspx

Skyward and other vendors are recommending that everyone use an alternate web browser until Microsoft releases a patch. 

Heartbleed issue: What you need to do

You may have heard news of the "Heartbleed" Internet security breach or gotten an email about it from friends. This email tells you what you need to do, which is, unfortunately, not as easy as just "change your passwords." It's organized in the ever-popular "Q&A" format.

Q: Is my school email safe?

A: Probably. We use Google Apps, and it was a Google researcher who found the flaw, and Google patched its systems very quickly. But you should change your OSD password just to be safe. 

Q: Is Infinite Campus safe?

A: OSD's IC server appears to be unaffected or fixed. Regardless, your IC password should be the same as your OSD email/network password, so you don't need to do anything specifically regarding IC.

Q: How about Skyward?

A: Skyward was never vulnerable due to the version of SSL it used, so your personal and HR information is not at risk.

Q: What do I need to do?

A: This is a two step process: 

1. Check to see if a site has been fixed. (Check the top 100 web sites here.)
2. AFTER a site has been fixed, then change your password for that site.

Q: Why not just change all my passwords right away?

A: Until a site has been patched, if you change your password, then the attacker can potentially get your new password as well. So wait until the site is patched before changing your password. More info here.

Q: What about sites that aren't in the top 100 list, like my bank?

A: You can check the status of any site with this tool from LastPass.

Q: Why is this such a big deal?

A: It potentially affects half of secure sites on the web, has been around for two years, and was only recently reported. More info here.

wireless network down for upgrades between 4-5 PM today (4/8/2014)

The district's wireless network will be down today for about 20 minutes sometime between 4:00 - 5:00 PM so that we can upgrade the wireless LAN controllers. You should plan to use a computer with a wired network connection during this time. 

I apologize for the short notice.

Update on delayed email delivery

Google has released some information regarding the delayed email deliver that occurred last week.

The problem with Postini Services should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.A copy of the quarantined messages will start to be reprocessed in the next hour. Engineers will start to redeliver messages in small batches. It's then expected that it will take several hours until all messages are reprocessed. Messages unaffected by the original issue and already properly classified as spam will also be reprocessed. A new copy of the affected messages will go through a full regular Postini scan using proper customer configuration settings and filters, as present at the re-delivery time. Reprocessed messages that are still considered as spam will be placed in quarantine again, creating a duplicate entry in the quarantine. The process will not clear out the Postini quarantine of affected message copies; message copies already quarantined will remain quarantined.

Based on this, it appears that in addition to email messages which were intentionally quarantined due to virus or spam, some (many) messages that should not have been quarantined were being incorrectly quarantined.

You can read more about this particular incident at http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=11&iid=f4d40ff81521acea4e58014d7a83ffeb

Although this was the result of what Google considers an error, we still get notifications on a daily basis of virus and spam outbreaks which Google stops from being delivered. These can also cause delayed delivery because Google blocks the offending IP address, and that IP address may be the source of legitimate emails as well. In fact, it's possible that email messages from OSD staff are originating from the offending IP address, due to the globally distributed nature of Gmail's infrastructure.

Action: block '550 mailbox unavailable'
Source: 113.162.75.147
Time: 2014/03/13 10:01:21 GMT

As always, if you have more questions you can contact the IT department.

Infinite Campus updated to version 1410.2

Upgrade complete
Version: E.1410.2
DB Refresh: No
Requested Date: 2014-03-09 17:00
Scheduled Date: 2014-03-09 17:00

Resolution: 

Automated update complete.

Delayed email delivery

Some users (myself included) have experienced delayed email delivery, ranging from hours to days. It appears this is due to a number of spam attacks aimed at our domain. When this happens, Google temporarily suspends email originating from the attacking IP address until the attack is stopped. 

As a brief historical context, email was never designed to be an instant form of communication. By design, mail servers are set to try to deliver email, and if they cannot, try again hours later, until a certain amount of time (the old default was two days) before giving up and sending a failure notice back to the sender. So although we have become accustomed to instantaneous delivery, it is not really designed that way.

I'll post other updates on this topic to this blog.

========
Updates: SPAM attacks

Action: block '571 spam source blocked'
Source: 182.72.181.33
Time: 2014/03/11 06:41:15 GMT

Action: block '571 spam source blocked'
Source: 186.118.195.40
Time: 2014/03/08 01:04:44 GMT

CryptoLocker Threat

Last week a Wisconsin school district was hit with a computer malware called “Cryptolocker”. This malware accesses files on your computer and/or server and encrypts them. The attackers demand money, and if the payment is not received, the malware will prevent the files from being accessed again.  The specific act in Wisconsin impacted over 40,000 files at the school district. 

This malware is spread through an email that appears to be a tracking notification from UPS or FedEx. This tactic will change soon, so please don't think this has anything to do specifically with shipping companies. 

Regardless of the type of message, you should ALWAYS be careful whenever you get an email containing a hyperlink, especially if it's unexpected. The best practice is to NOT click the link in the email, but to type the web address of the company (UPS, FedEx, Amazon, or whatever) into a different browser window. This reduces the threat of a hidden URL.

I don't necessarily think this one is much worse than a lot of other ones. But this serves as a good general reminder to be very careful about what you click. 

The school district network has a network security system that should help stop many threats, but your vigilance and caution are the best defense.

Here’s a link provided by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to more information on the malware. 

http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/02/ftc-fbi-warn-consumers-about-cryptolocker-new-breed-computer

web site schedule maintenance the morning of Saturday, 2/15

We will be performing routine server maintenance on our website ob Saturday, February 15, 2014 from 7:00 AM - 11:00 AM. While there will not be a complete outage during the maintenance window, connectivity will be sporadic during the required server reboots. We appreciate your understanding.

An even better fix for showing data in IC

Infinite Campus support tells us the following:

With the 1402 update, districts have had to have all users clear their history/cache if they use a browser that doesn't allow the settings to be established so that the browser history clears on exit or if they don't have their browser settings set so that the history does clear on exit. 

The link below explains how to clear the browser history/cache for all supported browsers and OS. Firefox and IE browsers contain the setting where it can be set to clear on exit. In Safari, the way to clear cache/history automatically is by turning on Private Browsing. For any Chrome users, they will need to clear it manually and should do so on a regular basis. 

https://community.infinitecampus.com/kb/display/DOC/Recommended+Browser+Settings

Fix for blank frames in IC

I have bad news and good news.

First the bad: The issue I described yesterday regarding Chrome browser not displaying IC content correctly also affects some Firefox, Safari, and IE installations.

Good news: We have discovered a solution that seems to work, at least sometimes. If you encounter a screen in which a portion of the page that normally should have data (typically the largest portion of the screen) is blank, try this:

1. Right-click on the portion of the page that is blank.
2. Choose "Reload Frame" from the resulting menu. (The exact menu will vary depending on the browser.)

After this, the content should appear in the frame like normal. However, this is hit-or-miss - it doesn't always fix it. We are trying to figure out what specific combination of software causes the behavior. 

So, please try using multiple browsers and reloading the frame to see if you find a combination that works for you. We will continue gathering information to figure out if there is a software fix we can apply.

New look for Infinite Campus

Infinite Campus has a new user interface. This new interface changes the look of the system without changing any functionality.  The search, help, folder tabs, tool outline and tools themselves all function as they have in the past.  All that has changed is an improvement to the system’s usability with a more modern look.  Here is a sample screen showing some of the changes:

More information on the user interface changes can be found in the 1402 release notes in the Campus Community.

New helpdesk system coming soon

Our current helpdesk system has tracked almost 20,000 tickets over the past few years, but is showing its age. It will be replaced soon with a new product that has better security, is more user-friendly, and have more functions to help us serve you better. More details will be provided before we implement.

Update: Phones are working

Update: Phones are back.
>>>
The district's phone connection to the outside world is not working. Phones internally can call each other, but nothing in or out. I'm working with the provider to try to troubleshoot the issue. (I think maybe the electrons are frozen.) 

I'll either send another email, or post to the tech blog at osdtech.blogspot.com, to update you. Sorry for any disruption this has caused.

Internet bandwidth upgrade complete

The district's Internet bandwidth upgrade was finished late this morning and it seems to be working well. We are using both Internet connections and our total throughput is well over 100Mbps (our old limit). We have eased some of the traffic limits that were in place, but we are continuing to prioritize traffic that could cause problems. For example, Adobe updates are throttled because 2,000 computers all downloading the same update would clog the connection no matter how fast it is. We also will continue to prioritize traffic that is instructional in nature, and limit or block traffic that is not instructional.

Internet disruption Friday, 1/17 4:00 PM for upgrade

Internet service will be interrupted for approximately 10-15 minutes on Friday, January 17 after 4:00 PM so that we can perform upgrades. Please plan accordingly. I apologize for any interruption.

This upgrade will increase our usable Internet bandwidth from 100 Mbps to 500 Mbps. This should alleviate the slow performance of many Internet-based services. Some have asked if this will make all Internet access faster, or if it will just make things "not as slow." This is a nuanced question, and the answer is a bit complex, but I'll answer it using the Beltline highway as an analogy.

Our Internet connection is like the Beltline. The speed limit is 55mph, and if there are only a few people using it, everybody can go 55mph. But at certain times like rush hour, so many people are trying to use it that everybody slows down. If we were to add 8 more lanes to the Beltline, the speed limit would still be 55mph, but even during rush hour, most people would still be able to go 55mph. So adding lanes isn't the same as increasing the speed limit. 

Our Internet connection is similar. The maximum speed is limited by many factors, such as the capacity of the servers on the other end to send out data, and the overall speed of the Internet as a whole. During school day peak usage times, so many of us are trying to use it that we all slow down below the maximum speed. Adding bandwidth makes it possible for more simultaneous users to achieve the maximum speed.

Brief Internet interruption today 4:30 PM

Internet access will be interrupted for about 10-15 minutes today starting at 4:30 PM so that we can replace our firewall. Sorry for the late notice. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.