Notices & bulletins

The deadline to request assistance to migrate your surveys from the FluidSurveys platform to SurveyMonkey has been extended from April 10 to Friday April 13, 2018 at 12pm Pacific.

To facilitate equipment modernization, all campus Internet access will interrupted for a two hour period beginning Friday, April 27 at 11:00 pm. Services will be fully restored by 1:00 am April 28. No services hosted at UVic will be available from off campus during this window.

In order to perform necessary system maintenance, an outage of multiple enterprise applications is required on Thursday, April 5th from 8:00 pm to 12:30 am.

We are excited to announce that the SurveyMonkey survey service is now available to all current faculty, staff, and students! SurveyMonkey replaces the FluidSurveys pilot service, which will be discontinued on May 11, 2018.

Microsoft has released the latest version of Windows 10, known as the Windows 10 Creators Update, or Windows 10 version 1703.

The Cisco AnyConnect Client that is used by Windows and Mac workstations to access the UVic Virtual Private Network (VPN) service will be updated on Feb. 27, 2018.

On Wednesday, February 14, 2018, University Systems will be performing Enterprise Oracle Database maintenance on a number of administrative systems.

Thank you for participating in the FluidSurveys Pilot at the University of Victoria. We want to inform you that this service will be extended until May 11, 2018.

On January 17, 2018 at 11:30 p.m., University Systems will be performing planned maintenance on a number of administrative systems such as student records, payroll, and finance.

University Systems will be shutting down legacy MySQL Services on January 31, 2018.

Security vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre have been identified that affect Mac and Windows workstations, mobile devices, and servers from the past decade. These vulnerabilities allow for protected memory to be accessed that may include sensitive information such as passwords and cryptographic-keys.

University Systems will be applying security updates to all production systems to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. From 5pm Friday, January 5 until 5pm on Sunday, January 7 there will be brief outages of services as they are restarted including Banner, FAST, and CourseSpaces.

Please be advised that the Computer Help Desk will close at 6 p.m. on December 23rd and will be closed for the holidays from December 23rd–January 1st. We will reopen on January 2nd and resume regular hours.

A security flaw in macOS High Sierra was recently discovered that allows any user to gain administrator access to an affected machine without knowing a valid administrator passphrase.

FAST access has been restored.

UVic’s MyPage and the Sign In to UVic service will be upgraded on Thursday, Nov 23, 2017 between 5:00 am and 7:30 am. During this timeframe, there will be short service disruptions where MyPage and the Sign In to UVic service will be unavailable

A serious vulnerability has been announced in the Infineon Trusted Platform Module (TPM) processors used to secure encryption keys in many PCs and laptops. We utilize TPM modules to implement Bitlocker whole disk encryption on all of our managed computers. Vendors using Infineon TPM chips include HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Microsoft (Surface lines), Acer, Asus, LG, Samsung and Toshiba. Lenovo has reported that a number of their devices are impacted by this vulnerability, but our standard Dell desktops and laptops do not appear to be using the Infineon TPM chips.

The Technology Solutions Centre has continued to evaluate our standard models in response to the release of new hardware and requests from the campus community. Several models were tested for performance, cost, value, support, and serviceability.

A vulnerability with the WPA2 secure wifi protocol has been announced today. This vulnerability, called KRACK attacks, impacts all wifi enabled devices including computers, mobile devices and wifi access points and routers. Because this is a flaw in the WPA standard it impacts all devices that use the WPA protocol. University Systems is investigating the impact of this vulnerability on the UVic wifi network and wifi enabled devices.

On Nov 10, 2017, University Systems will be upgrading the University's central administrative system (Banner) used for student records, payroll, and finance. Due to this upgrade, Banner will be unavailable from Friday, Nov 10, 2017 at 5:00 pm through Monday, Nov 13 1:00 pm.

macOS High Sierra (version 10.13) is the latest release of the Apple operating system for Macintosh workstations. Until a more thorough test and review of the release version of High Sierra can be performed after September 25th, 2017, University Systems does not recommend upgrading to macOS High Sierra.

As of September 5, 2017, the following student computing facilities' hardware will be upgraded: Clearihue A103 (iMacs) CLE-A035 (Mac Minis)

Clearihue A030 (formerly A010) has just been refreshed to create a multi-purpose, pod-style learning and teaching environment.

UVic’s MyPage upgrade from July 12, 2017 will be rolled back at 6am on Wednesday July 19, 2017.

Starting July 28, all PaperCut printing will use funds from your ONECard Flex account. This will make it easier for everyone with funds to access one account.

In order to perform necessary system maintenance, an outage of multiple enterprise applications is required on Sunday, June 4th from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm.

Global Ransomware Alert

On April 28th at 8:30AM, we will be changing the old SharePoint (https://share.uvic.ca) service so that it cannot be directly accessed from off campus. If you need to access it from off campus, you will need to use the UVic VPN service.

Share.uvic.ca, the legacy SharePoint service, will be decommissioned on June 1, 2017.

On Nov 10, 2016, University Systems will be upgrading the University's central administrative system (Banner) used for student records, payroll, and finance. Due to this upgrade, Banner will be unavailable from Thursday, Nov 10, 2016 at 5:30 p.m. through Sunday, Nov 13 3:00 p.m.

Between June 15 and September 30 the university will be implementing a contact information update process. Depending on when you have last updated your contact information, you will be prompted when Signing in to UVic to validate or provide an update of your contact information.

The Technology Solutions Centre has been listening to your requests, reviewing new laptops, and searching for devices that meet the evolving needs of our users. We are pleased to announce the availability of our new standard laptops with the latest Intel Skylake architecture running Windows 10.

Starting April 26, 2016, University Systems will be upgrading, replacing, and improving the computing equipment available in the Clearihue and Human and Social Development computing facilities.