It’s only mid-September, classes haven’t even started yet but we’re starting to see phishing scam emails starting to land in email boxes. Fall term is when scammers try to get you to give up your login credentials. They assume you may be new to the College or have let your guard down after a nice [...]
The CAT worked over the weekend to get the lab in operation. There are new tables and new 27" monitors with adjustable arms. As with the Particle Lab, the computer are now running Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble).
At about the same time last year, we announced that we were locking off our LInux lab "proxy" addresses behind the firewall. Due to a number of factors, this task was postponed and we are finally going to make the change on Wednesday, Sep 11. Read the included message for details. Note, existing CS login servers (ada/babbage/quizors) are [...]
Over the past few years, Google has been trying to reign in runaway storage consumption for its Google Apps for Education tier. For faculty and research groups who found PSU’s google storage to be a convenient and limitless resource, that era is now over. OIT now has to ensure that the university stays below a [...]
Starting Spring 2023, access to services running on "high ports" (ie: network ports numbered 1024 and higher) on remotely accessible MCECS Linux systems will be blocked to external users. You will still be able to ssh into those systems. However, if you are running any services (programs) on these systems that listen at high ports, [...]
It looks like the Fall term phishing campaigns against PSU users (particularly faculty and staff) have really picked up in recent weeks. The scammers have been seen trying waves of the following: Payroll problems based message that leads you to a fake PSU credentials site that tries to capture Duo authentication Google drive or One [...]
CS Users! Please run resource heavy programs on babbage.cs.pdx.edu - not ada (linux.cs.pdx.edu). Some clarification of the lore about ada and babbage, the two primary multi-user Linux systems available to CS students. ada.cs.pdx.edu (aka linux.cs.pdx.edu) Used as a general workhorse. Designed to handle users going through the edit - compile - execute cycles of general [...]
If you are a user of the web interfaces to the database services provided by the CAT, be advised that we are moving from the old phpPgAdmin and phpMyadmin to a new interface called Adminer (formerly known as phpMinAdmin). The functionality of the old interfaces will still be provided, although the graphical layout will be [...]
We will be making a slight home directory permissions change for all users on our systems. The end result will lock down access to user home directories so that only the owner of the account can access the files. We expect this to only affect a very small minority of users who have specifically opened [...]
At the start of each academic year, we usually see a variety of attempts by scammers and other miscreants to try and steal your credentials, get you to give up money or personal information, or get you to run malware. This term is already up and running with a “Covid Test” phishing campaign. Make sure [...]