If you receive an e-mail from "The Colby Up-Grade Support Team." that asks you to reply to the email and supply your password, please ignore this phishing attempt. This is a scam. It is very similar to email you may receive asking you to verify your banking or other private account information. Please do not respond to these types of emails. If you have responded, click here and change your password.

The only time you should ever type your login and password is on a Colby web authentication page, when logging into a College-owned computer or in an email client (e.g., Eudora). Colby's IT Services staff will never ask you for your password in email, by phone or in conversation.

Check out Colby's new Portal by clicking the myColby logo above or by going to my.colby.edu

You'll need to login by clicking the button in the upper right hand corner to see relevant information to you.

Colby has migrated to a new e-mail server. If you are having trouble sending or recieving please check your Eudora settings - Windows Macintosh

Jason Parkhill is the new Director of Academic ITS. He has already been busy this summer meeting faculty and staff across campus and familiarizing himself with Colby.

You can visit Jason this summer on the 4th floor of Lovejoy in the back room of the LRC. [Be careful around the ongoing construction!] This Fall he will be moving into his new office in Lovejoy 146.

Graduating Seniors' e-mail accounts will be deleted on Septermber 1, 2007. You may setup an e-mail redirect, an alumni account, or read more about it by clicking here. 

Graduating seniors will recieve a copy of the Microsoft License agreement with serial number before leaving Colby allowing you to use the current version of Microsoft Office after you leave campus. This will come via e-mail from Ray Phillips, Director of ITS - the agreement does not entitle you to future upgrades.

The campus has experienced a series of power outages since Monday which have caused some problems with computers not turning on properly and some server and network systems not functioning properly. During the power outages, Internet service to Miller and some residence halls has been unavailable. Also, services such as e-mail, Web mail, Colby Web pages, and Colby0 have been unavailable.

If you experience problems with your computer after a power outage, please contact the appropriate support center for assistance.

The annual computer request process has begun. All computer requests should be directed through your specific department computer request coordinator. The complete list is available here.

Only department computer request coordinators are able to access the request Web page; however, if you are interested in the process, you may read the instructions here.

The deadline for request submissions is Monday, April 23.

The first step in computer allocations and distribution is verifying your current computer equipment. Please visit this Webpage to confirm or update your inventory.
Requests for new equipment can be made to your department computer request corrdinator

If you have noticed an increase in Spam e-mail messages, you are not alone. Colby’s e-mail system is set to identify and delete Spam if it scores high enough as determined by a filter called SpamAssassin. To better manage the Spam that comes through e-mail, you can setup filters within Eudora. For instructions on how to setup filters visit the following websites or contact the Support Centers – for faculty and staff call ext. 4222, students call ext. 4224.

Eudora Filters – Windows

Eudora Filters – Mac

ITS is recommending people not install IE7 at this time. We need to test the new application to ensure that the upgraded version works with Colby’s Web pages and applications. Initial reports indicate IE7 still has some flaws so we have disabled it in our automatic updates.

Colby0 is now only accessible by using secure ftp and terminal programs. Please install secure FTP and terminal applications which are now required. The following links provide additional information and instructions on downloading and configuring.
Secure FTP applications
Secure Terminal applications.

A reminder that toner for ITS standard printers is no longer ordered through Boise/Office Max.  Instead, people should contact Transco with the Transco ID number (white tag with blue lettering) to order additional toner – contact information is located on the Transco ID. If your printer does not have a Transco ID, please contact cclukey@colby.edu ext. 4215 with the CCID (Colby College ID – the blue sticker) make, model, location, and contact person for the printer.

You should continue to order enough toner to keep one spare on hand to use when the current toner runs out. Currently old toner cartridges are to be placed in a recycle bin located in The Eustis Service Center. Transco picks up this toner on a weekly basis.

Colby’s IT Services is implementing a Network Access Control system in the residence halls that requires individuals to register their computers on the network. This process checks to make sure each computer has up-to-date antivirus software installed. This system is being implemented to protect student-owned computers from infection and/or attack by compromised computers on the network. Many students, in response to last week’s notice, have already successfully registered in preparation for final activation of this system.

The Network Access Control system will be fully activated on Monday, September 25, 2006, at noon. This means that, if your computer is not registered by that time, network functionality will be removed and your web browser will be directed to the registration page with access to web resources to install anti-virus software. Until registration is successfully completed, only these resources can be accessed. You will not have access to email and general Colby web pages. Only limited access to network resources out on the Internet will be available.

See the full notice here.

Yes, Windows can run on a Mac - there is BETA software called Boot Camp that allows this. However, ITS is not supporting Boot Camp BETA (Windows running on a Mac) for the following reasons:

• It is BETA software which is not supported even by the developers
• It is only a trial version for a limited time
• Apple warns: "Do not use Boot Camp in a commercial operating environment or with important data."
• Colby does not have extra licenses for Windows - our site license only covers upgrades to an existing Windows operating system

If a Colby owned Mac has Windows running on it and there is a problem, ITS is unable to provide any support for retrieving data from the computer. Our first course of action will be to reimage the computer with a standard Colby image. Data from a regular backup will need to be used for restores and the ITS backups will not backup a Windows partition on a Mac. If you have any questions about this, please contact Cora Clukey at ext.4215.

Anti-virus companies have issued a warning about vulnerablities in Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows. Unpatched Office systems may be vulnerable to e-mail attachments using Word documents. It is advised to use caution when receiving any unknown e-mail attachment.

Sophos should be issuing updated virus definitions today to protect against this vulnerability. Read here for more information.

To update your Microsoft Office program, you may visit the Office homepage and click on "Check for Updates" in the upper right corner. If you have questions about this process, please contact the Support Centers - faculty and staff use ext. 4222, students use ext. 4224.

3:00 pm Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The network has been restored to the Miller Faculty Offices. Networking hardware was switched out and there have not been any problems for approximately an hour.

If you do experience network problems, Faculty and Staff may contact the Support Center (4222) and students may contact Student Computer Services (4224).

8:30 am, Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The network on the 2nd and 3rd floor of Miller Library has been experiencing problems since Monday at 3pm resulting in disruption of e-mail services, web browsing and access to other network resources.

The Network Services group is addressing the problem and we will update you on progress as soon as possible.

Sending mail from off campus seems to be working now. If you continue to have problems sending mail, we suggest you check your e-mail first then you should be able to send e-mail.

Please contact the Support Centers with any questions. Faculty and Staff call ext. 4222, students call ext. 4224.

The change of servers has been made and e-mail is running from another server while the primary e-mail server hardware issues are being evaluated.

At this time, sending e-mail from off campus using an ISP other than Colby may still have sporadic problems. If you experience this problem, please use webmail (www.colby.edu/webmail) instead. Do not run Eudora and webmail at the same time or you may corrupt your in box.

Also, there will be no AOL e-mail, inbound or outbound, being delivered for a 24-hour period of time starting at 2:30 pm today. These measures are necessary in order to get out of their rate-limiting setup (a result of a problem with the new e-mail server’s configuration this weekend).

The e-mail server change has been made and mail is working properly; however, the DNS changes may not have taken effect throughout other internet service providers. Therefore connections to Colby e-mail from off campus connections, such as Adelphia or GWI, may still be experiencing problems

If you cannot use POP (Eudora) mail from outside Colby, please use webmail at www.colby.edu/webmail to send and receive e-mail.

The email server will be unavailable starting at 5:00 pm this evening (Friday) and will be unavailable for about two hours while we move it to another server. You should not need to make any changes in the way you access email as a result of this change.

We have had a series of problems with the email server this week, culminating in an extended outage from 4:30 pm Wednesday to 2:15 pm Thursday. Diagnostics have not revealed the cause of these hardware failures and we are not confident that the server will operate reliably.

We have a plan to migrate email service to a different server but that process will take two to three hours and, if done as a result of failure of the primary server, will result in any mail received between the time of the last backup and the time of failure being lost (or more accurately, unavailable on the storage drives of the primary machine until they can be retrieved).

We have decided to proactively move email now to an alternative server rather than waiting until we have another server failure. This will take place today beginning at 5:00 pm and should take about two hours. Once the service is running again, you should be able to access it in exactly the same way you have in the past.

Please consult the ITS web page for updates: www.colby.edu/its

E-mail services have been up and running since 2:15 pm; however, there is a backlog of over 8,000 e-mails that need to be delivered. This may take 4 or 5 hours to complete. During this time, you may be receiving e-mails out of sequence.

The email server is being restarted and email is beginning to flow now but we are not confident that it will stay up. Although some hardware swaps have been made, system behavior suggests that we have not identified and resolved the problem(s).

We will be watching the system carefully and responding if it fails again.

We are also implementing a plan to move email service to another machine if the primary server machine fails again, although performance may not be satisfactory.

We very much appreciate the patience of the Colby community as we have dealt with this situation. We apologize for the hardships that this outage has caused.

2:00 pm this afternoon is the earliest likely time that email service will be restored. Depending on difficulties encountered, it may be later.

We estimate that repairs will be completed and the system restored to full operation by noon today. When it restarts, the system may be slow due to processing of the backlog of email.

ITS is addressing a hardware failure in the College's email server. We hope to have service restored as soon as possible today, Thursday, and will keep the community informed here of the status of our work.

This is the latest in a series of problems with the email system that began on Thursday, April 6, when a power fluctuation on campus triggered a complete shutdown of the machine room when the UPS battery backup system failed to carry the facility through the event, was followed by an email system failure and manual restart on Saturday, and then an extended outage on Sunday, during which we brought in a Sun Microsystems technician, who was able to restore service. On Monday, the primary processor card was replaced and we had hoped all problems were resolved. Late in the afternoon yesterday, Wednesday, the system again failed and could not be restarted. Sun Microsystems technicians are again rushing replacement components to us and it is hoped that the system will be operational again later today, Thursday.

As members of the community are aware, we have been dealing with concerns about low staffing levels in support of the central servers. The current outage response is only in relatively small ways influenced by our support levels. Our critical staff member with the technical expertise to address the situation has been available, although serving on jury duty part of the time. Additional staff would not have appreciably improved our ability to respond to this particular situation. However, problems like this at times when a critical staff member is completely unavailable for an extended period of time is precisely the concern we have had.

We will be providing updates on this outage on the ITS home page.

We apologize for the difficulties this is causing. We are doing all we can to address the situation.

If you are experiencing other problems, please contact the Faculty/Staff Support Center at 4222 or Student Computer Services at 4224.