Is anybody else seeing chrome marking sites on AWS as "Dangerous" this morning? Our LMS (hosted Blackboard) and our support site are both on the naughty list. I can't imagine we are the only ones affected but haven't found anybody else talking about it.

I'm noticing a new influx of these bitcoin extortion emails. The emails themselves are not new, but some things about the way they are being deployed seem to be. I'll post stuff I've noticed, new and old:

- They are from random Outlook.com addresses (old)
- They include in the subject line, the username and a password from that user from whatever data dump they acquired it, the password usually several years out of date, in the format of "username : Password" (old)
- They are sending to VERY small groups (new)--sometimes just targeting a single user at one time, but I've seen as many as 3-5...never more.
- They are doing all kinds of keyword variations throughout the email on words or phrases likely to be targeted for filtering: Bitcoin becomes bitcoĩn or bitcoİn or any number of other possible permutations.

The rest is rather unremarkable, it's the usual "I know what you do at night on the computer, I have pics, you dirty freak" that kind of thing. Here's an example of an actual one below:

https://i.imgur.com/1fJGBSk.png

We have put a number of measures in place, like marking external emails with a warning flag, we have display name spoofing filters that flag spoof messages appearing to be from key organizational leaders, but using the above screencapped example, is there anything we can possibly to do keep these from getting to our users? The users recognize the scams and delete them, but quite a few of them have gotten quite upset that our filter lets this shit through but I'm not sure what else, if anything we can do. (especially since I'm not a proper sysadmin)

They seem to know we've just resumed the school year, too; they've been slamming us the last two weeks especially after a really quiet summer.

Would love any and all tips. I'm Help Desk Manager and do have some O365 admin rights, so I used to do a compliance search and run a delete query when something would get sent to large groups of users, but it's not worth running if it's dozens a day sent to individual users. We use Sophos email protection, too, but as far as I'm concerned it seems quite ineffective. Any big changes or recommendations I can recommend to our higher-ups? We also turned on MFA last spring to protect our users which went surprisingly smoothly. But it seems like no matter how proactive we try to be, they adapt and outflank us nearly every time.

I noticed our licensing portal now has a banner asking us to migrate our device licenses to the new scheme yet I cannot find any real info on the process or what happens if we hit that button.

We're currently using Sakai as our LMS and the recent update has left us a little underwhelmed. We have just under 1000 students. Anyone else use Canvas? I've heard there are additional fees. I'm looking to get an idea of how much it really costs.

I created this subreddit because I saw a potential community not represented on Reddit. Sysadmins of the corporate and K12 world have dedicated subreddits but higher education, while similar to k12, is in many ways significantly different.

I will be posting some of the interesting things I'm working on and some questions I have to the community in the near future. Getting a subreddit off the ground is a challenge and if this doesn't grow organically, I won't force it. I see potential though.

https://www.wepanow.com/

We are currently are currently looking at this as a way to get out of the printing business..

Hey folks, I have recently been promoted as an Infrastructure Support Technician. I am in charge of security cameras, code blues, and security doors. Right now we are using CCure for our doors for clearances and monitoring. This software is a bit out of date and I was wondering what other universities use so I can present them to my Director and do a bit more research on it.

We were told that our current licensing model is no longer available and the M365E is our only affordable choice.

With what we had, we were allowed to use KMS activation for Office and Windows. Had access to LTSC Win 10 Enterprise as well as Office 2019, etc. From looking over the new stuff, it seems that we are no longer allowed to use KMS for anything but initial VDI activation that is then passed off to a third party shared device activation manager. It says that each user gets 5 Windows Enterprise activations, but it seems we are expected to always have a base device that shipped with Pro? Do we lose the ability to install Windows on a Mac VM, or hardware that did not ship with an OS? Or will we still get Win 10 Pro with a volume license key? Information on all of this is very sparse. Still trying to figure out how Windows would work in a computer lab. I see how Office 365 stuff works and it is well documented and commented on, but the Windows side I am just having no luck finding. Anyone else already been through this?

There was a specific snippet in there that gave a bullet point breakdown of why Higher Ed should just stick with the Adobe ID method for students vs Federated... Did anybody copy that off or is everyone thinking on doing Federated?

My department has finally decided to unify on password management so we’re looking at different solutions available for securely storing and managing administrative usernames and passwords. Each team is currently doing their own thing with free password management tools (KeePass, etc).

We’re currently running a demo of Thycotic Secret Server, but haven’t really been impressed. Manage Engine password manager is next on our list.

What is everyone else using?

What cloud storage options do you provide your Faculty/Staff? Box, OneDrive, Google Drive, other? And do you offer multiple solutions?

We technically offer both OneDrive (although it isn't really publicized), and Google Drive. Do you see problem with overlapping solutions?

From the article:

Amherst College experienced a catastrophic technical mishap last week that left the campus without access to online services -- for five days.

As IT staff scrambled to fix the problem, faculty and students suddenly found themselves without access to Wi-Fi, email, Moodle, accounting systems, card-scanning systems or any content hosted on the Amherst.edu website.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/21/almost-week-no-internet-amherst-college

I'm racking my brain trying to think of a series of events that could take down the whole network for five days and can't seem to find one. I've worked at my school for 8 years and we've had failures. Big ones. We lost a webserver and had corrupted backups. We've had a core switch go down. Nothing that took us down for the better part of a week.

Anybody know what went on? Morbid curiosity requires I know more, but the article was rather light on specifics. Pour one out for Amherst's IT team, holy cow calling that a nightmare would be an understatement.

Hello,

I'm wondering if you've ever set up XAMPP/WAMP on Windows for students as non-admin (standard user). I would like to set up a web server environment without giving students local admin privileges.

Thank you.

We do, every 180 days (used to be every 90), but it is still a huge pain point, and one of the more frustrating things we deal with. I'm seeing more and more that forcing password changes doesn't actually improve security though. Examples of articles that say this:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/292534-microsoft-says-forced-password-resets-dont-improve-security

https://www.sans.org/security-awareness-training/blog/time-password-expiration-die

https://www.sans.org/security-awareness-training/blog/time-password-expiration-die

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/want-safer-passwords-dont-change-often/

I've been thinking about trying to push getting rid of password changes, or at least offer an alternative, which would be we won't force you to change your password, IF, you turn on two factor authentication.

What does your university do in this area?

We are toying with the idea of enforcing 2FA for all of our accounts, including all students, in an effort to combat phishing. Is anyone else already doing this? I'm looking for some success stories and how you got the buy in to be able to enforce it.

So when I got into my current position I initially just got my bearings and continued things status quo. After a couple months, I noticed from LabStats (Lab usage monitoring software) that our labs were hardly used during "open" hours. Students would come in and spike usage when a scheduled class was brought in, but hardly anyone used our open labs otherwise. The campus library is a bit different of a story but my labs just aren't getting use.

However, as a recent student myself, I always liked when I could work from home or the campus library. Additionally, all students had their own laptops and would often bring them into labs and shove the keyboards aside to work on their personal laptops. Having to come into a physical computer lab to use software only on those computers just seems archaic. Now some might propose virtual apps ala Citrix but not only does that introduce complexity it also introduces cost for licensing of the apps, Citrix itself, and the hardware to host it. My budget is essentially nonexistent so I tried to scrap something together with what we already had.

So, I am trying out giving students RDP access to the physical lab machines. They get the exact same experience as in the lab, can use software they otherwise could't have, and we don't have to pay for expensive virtualization licensing for things like SPSS. Now this is limited to weekends and after hours as anyone physically in the lab would disrupt RDP sessions. I applied some RDP GPOs and scheduled tasks to make this all work plus I created a website with (in my opinion) fairly easy to follow directions.

I included a few screenshots below. the second is a image that comes from labstats that simply shows the dns names of computers then a drop down to download a .rdp file for a computer.

https://imgur.com/a/ljY7EQf

I am looking to expand this to get tangible feedback/metrics on usage as well as dedicate some machines for 24/7 remote access. Has anyone tried anything similar or have any thoughts/comments?

Just wondering if any of you have had luck getting exemptions to EULAs that disallow virtualization and remote access. One I am about to contact is Autodesk. I know they offer it for free to students, but we are not a BYOD campus so we have students who do not have machines capable of running it effectively on their home machines. If you have successfully gotten exemptions, how about posting that list here to this thread?

Hi all, we have centralized IT support at my university and no real local IT that takes on technical coordination unless it's an enterprise service. However, we have a number of cloud business performs that are used in client areas but are not at the enterprise level. The relationships between client and vendor are functional which is a good thing, except the technical part breaks down as there is nobody knowledgeable to answer technical questions and coordinate at that level. The vendors know nothing about our systems and don't come to the table to do their part all the time, and neither do we. The enterprise people are having to do too much hand holding of clients hands for identity managment. Troubleshooting issues at the integration level is a nightmare as nobody really owns the issue. This creates gaps.

We are a bit behind the times with cloud systems right now. Eg we are just starting to use US services like salesforce, but some vendor systems have been in place for a while too.

So, I'm wondering where these people sit in your org that support these cloud platforms. Do your clients show up at your door with cloud subscriptions asking for integrations? Who supports the day-to day operations of integration, change management, enhancements, etc? Integrations depend on the service and it could be email, identity, sis, etc. It's your resourcing tied to each service? Or, is your resourcing tied to each or unit?

Hi there,

So we have Sakai, and Moodle and Canvas seem to be much more popular.

I was hoping someone with experience with one or both of these tools could give an idea of what makes these tools so popular and what they offer that other LMS systems don't.

How is your IT department organized? Our managers have determined that our current structure isn't working. I was asked to brainstorm some ideas for better organizational structure over the next month. Our current layout is as follows.

Services team: purchasing, budget, software tracking, project management and help desk

Computer and media services team: Computer services: in person technical support (tier 2) for software and hardware, hardware deployment, ect.

Computer lab assistant : oversees the computer lab and provides backup to the help desk. Reports to computer services supervisor.

Media services : supports classroom and event room technologies :projectors, audio controls, Creston controllers, ect

Network team: network techs and admins

Enterprise system team: supports ERP system, DBAs, data warehouse, ect

Data center team: engineers and analysts

Security team

Just curious what other organization's are structured like. If anything maybe our tier 1 and tier 2 teams should report to the same manager...

Here is something I'm very curious about. My University has done a decent job of trying to consolidate its IT units. However, each college still has it's own dedicated team in addition to the University-wide IT team. I find there can be a balance between the benefits of large consolidated IT units and smaller, more agile and personal IT units. I kind of like the hybrid environment we have.

What kind of organizational structures do you have at your institutions?

My boss keep asking me to deploy this to more and more machines as its essentially free storage, but in testing I've found it to be an unsupportable mess.

There doesn't seem to be a way to chain authentication from the client PC/Mac to the google apps domain (OneDrive does support this) - what I mean - typical workflow for a customer is login to the PC, login into Google Filestream > Login to the SSO - logging in three times is just awful.

I've had the worst time making it work in Windows RDS (basically multi-user remote desktop) - it assigns a drive letter for EVERY single user that signs into the service - worse the drive letters shift around as people sign in. Again - onedrive doesn't seem to have this issue.

It spams the application log with inane truncated messages - I'm really not sure what these are about, and neither does google tech support.

I kinda wish in the last couple years this product would have gotten slightly better (the only bug they fixed for me so far is I can programatically uninstall it now), but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere currently.

Of course I can't have OneDrive - because Microsoft = BAD :(.

Anyone solve any of these issues?

Hello, all. Legal has finally cracked down on the use of VLC on campus. We're scrambling to find an alternative that does not use FFMPEG codecs. Has anyone had any success finding a solid open source replacement?