News - The University of Montana

A series of short network outages affecting the UM Missoula campus will occur on Wednesday morning, October 1, 2008, beginning at 5:00am until approximately 5:15am.  The purpose of these outages is to perform updates on network core equipment on the Missoula campus. There will be three separate outages affecting different sections of campus.  The total time for each outage should be approximately 5 minutes.

Here is the order and approximate time (as long as there are no problems encountered):

5:00am – 5:05am LA Computer Room outage

5:05am – 5:10am SC Core (affecting south half of campus to oval)

5:10am – 5:15am SS Core (affecting north half of campus to oval)

Internet Service to other campus locations should not be affected, however, services in UM Missoula that are used by other campuses will be affected during this time.

Thank you for your cooperation.

We are currently experiencing intermittent Exchange email service issues on the UM campus. Some users are being impacted and some aren’t.  IT system administrators are aware of the issues and are working to resolve them. Updates on the situation will be posted when available. We thank you for your patience during this time.

Regarding the suspension of the Active Directory transition, as of this morning, we have now reversed the provisining process to the UM Domain.

System administrators – you can now start creating accounts  in your Organizational Units for new employees and student workers. We ask that you use first.last@umt.edu for your naming convention. You can then e-mail IT_Opers@mso.umt.edu or select IT CSS Operations from the GAL to have these accounts mail enabled.

Please e-mail  Kenneth.burrington@umontana.edu and reda.haddouch@umontana.edu any employee accounts added after June 12 that you would like to have renamed and moved into your OU’s. Thank you.

NetIDs for all students who did not pay/finalize for Fall Semester by Tuesday, September 16, 2008 were deactivated on Thursday, September 18, 2008. This means that access to all NetID based services including GrizMail, Blackboard, OneStop, IT labs, campus wireless and library remote resources, is no longer available. For questions about your NetID access, contact IT Central, 243-HELP or visit us at Social Science 120.

As Steve Henry, Senior ACIO, IT-CNTS, explained at the September 9 Technology Partners Program quarterly meeting, due to several issues, we are going to suspend the Active Directory transition process that began on June 12 and revert back to the processes that were in place prior to June 12. We apologize for the confusion and frustration this process has caused. Here is an update:

 Suspension Date.

Before the suspension could occur, the Directory Services team had to modify and test the program code that Dell developed for the transition. This process is now complete and the team plans to revert back to prior June 12 processes beginning Monday morning, September 22.

Account Creation.

The Active Directory transition process involved automatic creation of UM domain and MSO email accounts for new employees, which meant that campus system administrators could no longer create domain user accounts. Now that we are suspending the Active Directory transition process, as of Monday campus system administrators may again begin creating their own mail-enabled employee accounts.

Password Synchronization.

One of the results of the June 12 Active Directory transition process is that password synchronizing did not work with the UM domain.  Before we resume the AD transition, this process will be addressed. 

What’s Next?

We fully intend to resume the AD transition process once two things are in place: 1) we need a workable early access process; 2) we need a University org chart embedded in Banner that we can use for this process. Once these processes are in place, we will begin the transition again, working with departments one by one to determine the best way to move forward. In the meantime, thank you for bearing with us.

For departmental system administrators who have user accounts that they manage in the new UM domain ou=employee container and want those accounts moved into their departmental ou structure, please supply us with a list of the account names.  Please contact Reda, reda.haddouch@umontana.edu or Ken, kenneth.burrington@umontana.edu with any questions.

If you would like to read a detailed recap of what led up to the suspension of the AD transition, click here.

NetIDs for all students who have not paid/finalized for Fall Semester by Tuesday, September 16, 2008 will be deactivated on Thursday, September 18, 2008. This means that access to all NetID based services including GrizMail, Blackboard, OneStop, IT labs, campus wireless and library remote resources, will no longer be available.

If you are a current student at the University, please take the necessary steps (i.e. finalize your bill) to correct your CyberBear status so that you will not lose access to these resources. Please keep the following dates in mind:

• The registration deadline for Fall Semester is 4:30 pm, Monday, September 15, 2008.

• The final payment deadline for Fall Semester is Tuesday, September 16, 2008 (4:30 pm in GrizCentral or midnight via CyberBear).

• Classes will be cancelled on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 for all students who did not pay and finalize by the deadline.

Otherwise, please be sure to forward or archive all emails and contact information that you may need from your GrizMail account prior to Thursday morning, September 18. For information on archiving your GrizMail email, please visit the GrizMail FAQ page.

The issue with one of our GrizMail email databases that impacted email service for some students is now resolved (HTTP 503 error). We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused. Thank you.

We are currently experiencing an issue with one of our GrizMail email databases that is impacting email service for some students. Students impacted receive an “HTTP 503” error when attempting to login. IT system administrators are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it. We apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this may be causing. We will post  an update as soon as the issue is resolved. Thank you.