As part of the Exchange 2010 migration, the legacy servers UISMAIL1 and UISMAILFE2 (virtual) have been decommissioned. RIP.

The next legacy mail server we expect to be decommissioned is UISMAIL6, once all of its users have been migrated.

Brian

There is now a new way to read the blog, by e-mail.  Every time some posts to the blog, you will get sent an e-mail.  If you would like to be added, send Tom or I an e-mail, and we can add you.

If you have an iPhone or iPad and you would like to use them to participate in the internal ITS instant message application, there’s an app for that. We have found that an app called Talkonaut can interface with our instant message service. Just go to the app store on your device. Search for Talkonaut (it has a picture of a rocket on the icon). Download the app and use yournetid@im.uis.edu as the username and your normal password to complete the setup. Once you have the app setup you should see a list of all the users already using the messaging service.

Enjoy
Tom

Would you like to know what the strengths are of your fellow ITS team members? If so, you can find a workbook here that has shows the top five strengths for ITS team members who have taken the assessment (NOTE: you may need to clear your browser’s cache to view the latest updated version). The ‘Standard’ tab organizes the different strengths alphabetically. The ‘Leadership’ tab follows the Gallup strength groupings of Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking.

This file will be updated periodically as more people complete the assessment. Check back often. 🙂

Please comment if you found this information helpful.

We are happy to announce ITS Graduate Assistant Jessica Gaido as our Student of the Month for February.  Jessica works as the productivity GA for the ISAT team and is in her first year of the Public Health Master’s program at UIS.

Congratulations Jessica!

Q. Can ITS employees who perform scheduled maintenance avoid having to come in every Thursday at 5:00 AM?
A. Yes, they can. In fact, no one will ever have to come in early every Thursday, and most people who use the maintenance window to perform updates and apply patches will not come in early more than a handful of times during the year.

Here are some options that can be leveraged to avoid having to be here early most Thursdays:

• Perform non-disruptive maintenance during regular hours. If work can be done to the systems that doesn’t interrupt access to campus services, then that work doesn’t need to be performed during the maintenance window. As a rule of thumb, I would consider work non-disruptive that doesn’t impair a use of a IT-provided service for longer than 1 minute.
• Don’t perform any disruptive maintenance that week. If there is no need to perform disruptive maintenance, then no one needs to come in early.
• Batch maintenance tasks together. Skip a week or two or three between performing routine maintenance, batching up patches and upgrades into larger bundles. However, this needs to be balanced with the more important goals of not falling too far behind in applying critical updates, not expanding the disruption period beyond the 2-hour window, and the increased difficulty of troubleshooting or rollback when things don’t work out as expected.
• Rotate the maintenance duties. Instead of the same person always doing the patching and updates, two or three people rotate. This has the added bonus of ensuring knowledge sharing on our critical systems.
• Schedule server reboots. When a server needs to be rebooted to fix a memory issue, apply a patch or perform a minor update, it can be scheduled to auto-reboot during the maintenance window. If there is doubt that the server will come up normally after the reboot, the first one or two times the work is done, the reboot can be monitored from either on campus or remotely from home. When a comfort level with the reboot process has been reached, then the reboots simply become part of normal operations and are monitored via WhatsUp, alerting us if it does not come back up at the expected time.
• Automate. Use scripting and other management tools to automate maintenance processes so that the work can be done during the window without anyone actually having to trigger it.

So these are a few ideas. There are probably some other good ones just waiting to be discovered. Again, the key concept of the maintenance window is that the time is reserved for us to use when we need it—not that we have to use it each time—and that disruptive maintenance takes place at a time when the campus expects it and it is minimally disruptive to the work of the campus community.

Q. How should time spent on work during the maintenance window be tracked?
A. If someone performs maintenance during the weekly time window either on campus or from home, they can balance that out by taking off earlier either the same day or another day within the same week, such that the total weekly time worked still comes out to 40 hours. It should not be considered overtime or comp time, just a temporary adjustment of their regular weekly work schedule.

Q. Will there be an evaluation period?
A. At least annually, we will review our maintenance window policy to see if there are ways to improve on it.