First Blaster, then Nachi Worm Infect Campus Workstations

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At 11:00 AM, the campus network was disconnected because of widespread infection of University workstations by the Nachi worm subsequent to an initial infection by the Blaster worm (see http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/ for more details). The University’s Windows servers do not appear to have been infected. A byproduct of Nachi infection is a large volume of network traffic, and it was this that apparently overwhelmed the campus network.

OIS employees have eradicated most worm infections in Jones Hall, McIntyre Hall, Wheelock Hall and Security Services, and non-public workstations in Collins Library.

Currently, most University network services are online, with the exception of Windows filesharing. Thus, access to MERLIN2 and ALEXANDRIA is unavailable at this time. We expect it to become available sometime tomorrow morning(Wednesday, 20 August) from the above buildings.

Mail System Upgrade

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Beginning in the early morning hours of Saturday, 16 August 2003 (soon after midnight) the University e-mail system, including Webmail, password changes, and the forward and vacation message management interfaces, will be unavailable. The Corporate Time calendaring system, dialin authentication, and the University’s proxy servers will also be unavailable
during this period. These improvements are neccessary for the email system to handle the higher email volumes that we are experiencing. We will be making a series of infrastructure changes in order to bring the new mail server hardware on line.

  • We will migrate the user data from the old mail server to the new mail server. It is recommended that you backup any important e-mail messages, and delete any unnecessary messages.
  • We will upgrade the directory server from version 4.11 to version 5.1 service pack 2.
    This upgrade is necessary for the new mail server to communicate with the directory server to authenticate users.
  • We will modify Orion, Sun server for Math & Computer Science, to authenticate against the upgraded directory server.

We expect that this will take approximately one day, due to the volume of mail data
that must be moved.
E-mail service will be restored to campus by 8:00 AM Sunday, 17 August 2003.

Please check the Network Service Failure and Status Log for
status information on the 16th. When the affected services become available, status will be posted at that location.

Internet connection down

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The internet connection was down from 15:30 to 17:45 due to a routing loop created by our service provider, ELI. Apparently, some old routes were inadvertantly loaded at the Tukwilla office during a routine upgrade.