Some of our sites are being hit with a denial of service attack. This is resulting in temporary failures on a number of MCS sites, including www.mcs.anl.gov. We’re working to get things back up quickly.

Just a reminder, we are sending in our orders this Friday, April 18th. If you have already responded to us, you can ignore this message. Hi all, Summer is approaching and so it’s time to order any new equipment needed for the influx of visitors. Below are the specs on our recommended equipment for this …

CIS is planning their next maintenance weekend from Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18. The actual scope of the work to be performed is not yet set, but please let us know if there are any significant impacts any sort of outage would have during these dates so we can plan accordingly. Thanks!

The lab is going through a cyber-security audit this month, which will have a few phases. They’re going to be trying any number of things to test our defenses and our ability to recognize and deal with cyber threats. Social engineering/phishing is almost certain to be part of their toolkit, and at some point they’ll …

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 …

Just a heads up that over the next couple of weeks, you may get some mail from me regarding mailman list cleanup. The messages are legit, there should be no embedded links, and they will merely inform you that unless you take action, the list mentioned in the subject will be retired. As a first …

A number of people are getting mails from [email protected] telling them of weak passwords and sending them to a site to reset it. It looks very legit, but it is most definitely not. It’s a phishing attack. If you visited the site in question and entered any information, let us (and [email protected]) know immediately.

The cause of our issues was an external Denial Of Service attack based around NTP (Network Time Protocol). It was targeted at a server here that used to provide that service to the outside world. We haven’t run an externally-facing NTP server in years, certainly not since we moved from 221. Blocking all access to …

First of all, the actual cause of the problem was a bad network link.  It was difficult to find, and we were just about to begin migrating the services out of the 221 data center into 240 when it was finally discovered. Here’s the link to Networking’s summary of what happened: https://slack-files.com/T025KBW9U-F025WFY2W-0c97c9 We discovered things were …