Reminder: Windows XP (and Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard) End of Life.

Below is the notice I sent out last month on this. This is just a reminder that it’s happening today. I neglected to mention in the prior notice that older Mac OS installations would also fall into the End of Life rule, and thus anything running MacOS 10.6 or earlier will not be able to access the web from the lab’s wireless or VPN infrastructure. Sorry about that, it was an oversight on my part. If you have a machine that’s affected by this, let us know and we’ll work to get you upgraded or find a solution. Thanks!
Prior announcement:

Hi, folks. For those who don’t know, at the end of the month, Windows XP is finally going to be deemed “End of Life” by Microsoft. This means no more security updates, and it’s officially an unsupported OS. As part of security mitigations for this, the lab will be clamping down on Windows XP being exposed to the outside world. The first step in this is that come April, any web traffic that’s detected to be coming from Windows XP will be blocked by the lab’s web proxy. This will affect anyone on the VPN or using the lab’s wireless infrastructure, all of which is behind the web proxy. But also, we need to document any Windows XP systems that need to continue running. We have no systems that meet this criteria in our officially supported infrastructure, but if you have any that you’re using and rely on for your research, you should let us know if you haven’t already been approached on it. Any systems that need to remain running Windows XP need to be protected by a firewall, and we need to make sure that is indeed the case. Please report any Windows XP systems you need running to systems at mcs.anl.gov. Likewise, you can ask any questions at that address, or to me. Thanks!