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Washington State University
Information Technology Services News

Pullman DataCenter Firewall Work

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Date: Friday, June 2, 2023
Start Time: 8:00 p.m.
End Time: 9:00 p.m.

The following work is being completed: After the Pullman DataCenter issues on Wednesday, the previously passive DataCenter firewall was left in a suspended state. ITS will move the suspended firewall back to the passive state during this maintenance window to restore high-availability.

Duration of impact for all locations: No impact is expected.

Affected Processes: No outage is expected.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

Questions? Please contact Crimson Service Desk: via email at crimsonservicedesk@wsu.edu or phone at 509-335-4357.

WSU Wireless Certificate Change, 6/6

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Dates: Tuesday, June 6th, 2023
Start Time: 8:00 PM
End Time: 9:00 PM

The following work is being completed: ITS will replace the certificates on the WSU Clearpass Radius servers for WSU Wireless.

Duration of impact for all locations: Impact will be up to 5 minutes as the Cert is replaced on all Clearpass servers, but the entire maintenance window is reserved.

Affected Processes: WSU Wireless users.

Follow up steps customers need to take: The simplest client scenario is no user interaction. Some clients will require user acceptance of the new certificate for the wireless network or will provide a prompt asking if they expect this wireless network in this location. In this situation, some clients will typically ask the customer to press an “Accept”, “Connect”, or “OK” dialog. This may, or may not, be accompanied by some information about the certificate, radius server, and wireless connection.

Questions? Please contact: Crimson Service Desk

Pullman Campus Firewall Maintenance, 6/5

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Date: Monday, June 5th, 2023
Start Time: 8:00 PM
End Time: 10:00 PM

The following work is being completed: ITS is adding additional hardware to the Pullman Campus Firewall pair at the request of the vendor.

Duration of impact for all locations: No outage is expected.

Affected Processes: Although no service interruptions are expected, this maintenance involves several failovers between the active and passive firewalls. Also, high-availability has to be suspended to perform this work and then be re-enabled.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

Questions? Please contact Crimson Service Desk via: email at crimsonservicedesk@wsu.edu or phone at 509-335-4357.

Everett Firewall Maintenance, 6/1

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Date: Thursday, June 1, 2023
Start Time: 9:45 PM
End Time: 11:00 PM

The following work is being completed: ITS is performing some preventative troubleshooting steps on the Everett firewalls.

Duration of impact for all locations: Possible internet service interruptions lasting up to 1 minute may occur, but the entire maintenance window is reserved for this work.

Affected Processes: Services located behind the WSU Everett firewall pair.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

Questions? Please contact Crimson Service Desk via email at crimsonservicedesk@wsu.edu or phone at 509-335-4357.

Change notification for June Linux Production Patching

Date: June 1, 2023
Start Time: 7:00 PM
End Time: Midnight

The following work is being completed: Linux systems managed by Information Technology Services will be updated to include newly released patches. As part of these updates, individual systems may need to be rebooted.

Groups affected: Entire WSU community

Duration of impact: Services may be unavailable for several minutes as servers are rebooted. Those services using redundant servers to provide additional availability should expect no user impact.

Processes or services affected: Processes that use ITS Linux services, including smtp.wsu.edu, Shibboleth authentication, ITS monitoring (zabbix), Splunk services, and the University communications web servers (wsu.edu and others) may be impacted.

Follow up steps: None.

Contact: Issues should be routed through the Crimson Service Desk (crimsonservicedesk@wsu.edu or 509-335-4357).

Changes to Microsoft Preset Safelinks

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Dates: Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023
Start Time: 8:00 PM
End Time: 8:10 PM

The following work is being completed: The current Microsoft preset (built-in) safelinks policy includes URL rewriting. There are limited issues with this since our email filter that processes external emails already wraps URL and this double-wrapping causes some URLs to break. We would be implementing a WSU safelinks policy that would disable URL rewriting.

Groups affected: All Exchange users

Duration of impact: Ten minutes to change to custom policy.

Processes or services affected: Microsoft defender
Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

For technical assistance, contact: mark.bradt@wsu.edu

Upgrading Tier 1 SCCM

Please see the following Information Technology Services notice:

Date: 05/24/2023
Start Time: 8:00 PM
End Time: 11:59 PM

The following work is being completed: Upgrading the Tier 1 SCCM service

Groups affected: Tier 1 SCCM services

Processes or services affected: ITS Tier 1 SCCM will be down during the change window, which means Tier 1 server patching and app installs will be offline.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

Contact: Data Center Operations at 5-0404

Pullman Network Outage

Dates: Thursday, May 18th, 2023
Start Time: 8:00 PM
End Time: 11:59 PM

The following work is being completed: ITS is working on the Pullman Border Firewall with the vendor to troubleshoot issues experienced earlier today. As a result of this work, there may be short Pullman Border Firewall outages although the entire maintenance window is reserved for this work.

Duration of impact for all locations: Several short outages of the Pullman Border Firewall may occur but the entire maintenance window is reserved for this work.

All processes affected: Outages may impact scheduled data processes and other connectivity needs.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

For assistance, contact: Crimson Service Desk via email at crimsonservicedesk@wsu.edu or phone at 509-335-4357.

Pullman Campus and ResNet Internet Maintenance

Please see the following scheduled Information Technology Services (ITS) maintenance processes:

Date:

  • Date postponed until future notice.
  • Date postponed until future notice.
  • Date postponed until future notice.

Start Time: Please see schedule below.

End Time: Please see schedule below.

The following work is being completed: The following work is being completed: ITS will upgrade Pullman campus and ResNet internet distribution switches. This maintenance will cause a 20-minute internet outage for users on the Pullman campus.

This work is being done on the following schedule:

Date postponed..

  • ITB MCF
  • Neill MCF
  • FSHN MCF

Date postponed.

  • ResNet Distribution

Date postponed.

  • Holland MCF
  • Sloan MCF

» More …

Changes to Microsoft Threat Protection policies for Phish and Spam emails

Please see the following scheduled ITS maintenance notification:

Date: Wednesday, 5/10/2023

Start Time: 8:00 PM

End Time: 8:10 PM

The following work is being completed: Microsoft implemented changes to Defender and changed the preset threat policies for Spam and Phish to include end user notifications when previously this was not the case and notifications were only sent to the 365 administrators. The details of this change are listed here (https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home?ref=MessageCenter/:/messages/MC505088) and were finalized around the middle of April. Since this change caught some users off guard, we are implementing custom threat policies for both Phish and Spam to change the settings back so that only 365 administrators are sent the quarantine messages from Microsoft.

Groups affected: All Exchange users.

Processes or services affected: Microsoft defender.

Duration of impact: Ten minutes to change to custom policies.

Follow up steps customers need to take: None.

Questions? Please contact mark.bradt@wsu.edu with any questions regarding this scheduled outage.