RACS - Computing Status

Announcement(s) List:

Announcement(s) Data:

01/04/2024 - Matlab License Update 2024

To nenew your Matlab license go to Help > Licensing > Update Current Licenses… and select that option. That should update your license for the year. If you continue to have trouble after that, close the program and look for and run the program "Activate Matlab" in the folder Matlab was installed in. Please contact RACS support for further assistance. 

12/05/2023 - Adobe Acrobat 2020 License Update

This is crucial information regarding an Adobe Acrobat 2020 licensing issue that will impact users starting December 1st. Named user licenses (e.g. Adobe Acrobat DC) are unaffected.

Background:
OSU UIT recently identified a licensing issue in Adobe Acrobat 2020, which will impact users running Adobe Acrobat 2020 with serialized licensing. This issue will prevent access to Adobe Acrobat 2020. Named users licenses (e.g. Adobe DC) are unaffected.  Impacted users will receive a licensing prompt when opening Adobe Acrobat. The prompt will say that their license is invalid and ask them to sign in.

Resolution:

OSU UIT has provided documentation on how to resolve this issue.  A KB article is available with the steps for Windows and MacOS. To summerize, first you must uninstall your current version of Adobe Acrobat. Next, reinstall the version from Adobe Creative Cloud which is already licensed in your name. If you need assistance with this please reach out via email or come by Burt 159.  

12/04/2023 - Email about "Gmail Messages are Moving"

You might see an message about email migration from Gmail to MS 365 with the subject "Your Gmail Messages are Moving to Microsoft 365 on December 21". If you get this message then you did still have an email account under Gmail that most likely had no email. Users who get this message may want to login to the Gmail page using their ONID account information and check to see if there were any emails prior to this date. This message only pertains to the email and calendar aspects of your Google account and you should retain access to things like Google Drive and most of the Google Suite after the migration of your email off Google. UIT is making this move to have all students, faculty and staff on the same email system to help manage resources, reduce labor to support and increase security. If you have concerns you can always contact the RACS group as well as the campus Helpdesk since this is a campus computing group migration. We have no ability to stop this migration and many groups have gone through this process over the last year, so campus should have the process down.

09/20/2023 - Sharepoint Security Updates

As part of our continual efforts to ensure that Oregon State University and its community are protected from cyber threats, we will be changing certain default settings for how information hosted on SharePoint can be shared with guests that are external to OSU.

What is happening? We will be changing certain default settings within SharePoint that will affect how files are shared with guests external to OSU.

• Currently, anyone with a link can access shared files without first signing in to a Microsoft account or providing a verification code. With this change, external guests must be signed in to their Microsoft account or provide a verification code to be able to access any shared files. They must also be signed in to the account that the sharing invitation was sent to.
• External guests will no longer be able to share any files within SharePoint that they do not own.
• Guest access to a SharePoint site or OneDrive will expire after 60 days. Access may be granted again at that time if needed.
• Guests who use a verification code will be asked to reauthenticate after 30 days.
• The default permission granted when sharing a file will be changed from “Edit” to “View”; permissions to edit a document will need to be granted.

Please note that SharePoint files can still be shared with guests external to Oregon State University. This change will also have no impact on how SharePoint files are shared with others who are internal to the university.

When will this happen? These changes will begin on September 25, 2023.

How will this impact me? This change does not directly affect members of the OSU community — how we share links and files internally within the university will remain the same. It will, however, affect the way our external guests interact with the information we share: to access any shared files, guests will either need to enter a verification code or be signed in to the same Microsoft account to which the sharing invitation was sent. They also will not have permissions to share any items that they do not own.

Why are you doing this? Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the current landscape indicates that higher education institutions are highly targeted. It is crucial for us to protect the university by tightening its security boundary and limiting the number of ways someone outside of the institution can gain access.

Protecting the university includes protecting its people, its data (from individual data to research data to institutional data), and its reputation as a credible teaching and learning institution.

I have questions or concerns about this maintenance. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this maintenance, please contact the Service Desk at beav.es/help or by calling 541-737-8787.

06/08/2023 - IT Systems Specialist Position Open in RACS

The RACS group has an open IT position. See the position listing. If you or anyone you know who may be a great fit for our college please send them our way.

06/05/2023 -Globus Update

We see a large increase in the SPAM and PHISHING via email. Please remember SPAM and PHISHING emails will look like the real thing but will be asking you to click on a link that takes you to a bad place in the internet. See message from the OSU CSO located here about PHISHING.

05/08/2023 -Globus Update

We have a Globus license here on campus and have successfully configured an Endpoint. Please contact RACS about using Globus if you are looking to do large file transfers or sharing.

04/13/2023 -Google Drive Update

We are seeing still about 60TB of used space on Google Drive for users within the CEOAS group. Please work with the RACS group to help continue to reduce this usage as much as possible.

04/03/2023 - Welcome to the new RACS webpage

Welcome to the new CEOAS RACS website. We will continue to update the pages going forward please let us know if you see any issues or have any ideas.

03/28/2023 - Update to CEOAS core network

RACS will be doing maintenance on the core Burt network at 7PM on March 28th, the Tuesday of Spring Break. This is the follow-up from the previous unsuccessful network maintenance during Winter break; We have done some thorough testing and resolved the issues that happened then. This will upgrade our campus connection from the current 10G to redundant 100G, and upgrade our internal backbone to redundant 200G in the data center itself. Assuming all goes according to plan this time, there will be two interruptions affecting all of Burt, Wilkinson, Admin and Dawes. The first will be the physical cutover, which will take twenty to thirty seconds. Shortly afterwards the second interruption will be a network topology re-convergence which will take six seconds. RACS will send an additional e-mail shortly before the maintenance and a follow-up one once the maintenance is complete.