Hi, everyone!  It’s been too long since I sent one of these out, and there’s a lot to cover here, so I’m going to try to make it easy for everyone to get the info they need and find the parts they’re most interested in.  I mean, it’s all very important and you should read every word and reflect on it next time you meditate, but let’s be real.  This newsletter is almost entirely focused on recent and upcoming changes in various lab policies.

Topics covered in this newsletter:

• Argonne VPN changes (if you never use the VPN, feel free to skip this.)
• Proofpoint and email addresses (this is definitely worth a read)
• Upcoming changes to how you can access Office 365 and Outlook (if you read your Argonne mail from your phone, this is important)
• Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (a good refresher)
• Laptop security, travel approval, and you (do you take an Argonne computer offsite? Read on.)

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A maintenance window for our Confluence service has been scheduled for December 20th, starting at 8 AM, in order to update the software. The Confluence service will be unavailable during the maintenance. Impacted URLs:https://confluence.cels.anl.govhttps://wiki.jlse.anl.gov Service is expected to be restored by the end of the day, and may be available sooner than that. If this …

Hi, everyone.  You can find the slides and a recording of the CELS IT Town Hall from last Wednesday on Box at https://anl.box.com/v/celsittownhall2023. As noted in that presentation, we began pushing some changes to the macOS computers that are enrolled in co-management to install the Nessus/Tenable agent (reports vulnerabilities), as well as best practices for …

A maintenance window of our Jira service has been planned for November 6th, 8 AM CDT in order to update the software and perform database maintenance. The Jira service provided by jira.cels.anl.gov will be unavailable during maintenance. Service is expected to be restored by November 7th, 5 PM CDT, and may be available sooner than …

Due to a security vulnerability we had to perform an emergency upgrade on the confluence sites confluence.cels.anl.gov and wiki.jlse.anl.gov.  At the moment, we expect both sites to return to service tomorrow (Wednesday).  If we can get them back faster, we will.

If you currently use Docker Desktop on your Argonne computer or in support of Argonne work, read on. A couple of years back, Docker changed the licensing terms for Docker Desktop requiring all but a handful of exceptions and personal use cases to pay a license fee, and even if you were entitled to free …

Hi, everyone.  This notice will serve as an “all clear” for the affected Legacy and GCE systems from this weekend’s power outage.  Some of the special systems we run that aren’t general use are still in the process of being brought back online.  We had a number of unforeseen networking issues as part of this, …

Please see our previous announcement on this for more backstory. As always, the systems administrators of specific systems (LCRC, ALCF, etc.) will notify you of the specific outage windows for their systems.  This announcement mostly serves as a general reminder and to highlight the aspects of GCE and Legacy that are affected. All Legacy-related systems …

Hi, everyone.  If there are three things you can count on as a certainty, there’s “Fast food menu pictures always look better than the actual product”, “Terms and conditions apply means you won’t get what you expect”, and “The 240 Data Center is going to have an outage quarterly.” Okay, I’m exaggerating. Sometimes the Terms …

Hi, everyone!  It’s been too long!  Or maybe not long enough, depending on how you feel about these things.  In any case, let’s proceed with all the exciting news from CELS Systems. In this newsletter we’ll cover a few topics, notably: New members of CELS Systems New members of CELS for the summer (aka, Welcome …