When the official password format fails!

Steve Sloan’s Recommended (Unofficial) SJSUOne Password Format Suggestion. These are not requirements, only my personal suggestions. If you have a current SJSUOne account, and the official SJSUOne Password Format fails, this works. Please do not tell anybody I (or anybody) said these suggestions were requirements. It is suggested by me that your SJSUOne password have the following attributes:

• From eight to eleven characters
• No spaces
• One upper case letter minimum
• One lower case letter minimum
• One number minimum
• Just one (and only one) exclamation mark (do not use any other so-called "special" characters)

Example: 1Porcupine!

Why? My best guess as to why this may make a difference is that you are trying to get a Linux server (Google) to work with a password from a Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controller (SJSUOne). This is not official; it is a suggestion, but it usually works.

No, you cannot reuse your old password. Just forget that idea.

About Yesterday's IT Service Interruption at SJSU

The following was sent to the SJSU IT community:

All services have been restored. Access to www.sjsu.edu was restored around 3:20pm. The rest of the services including SSO were restored successfully and tested around 5pm. The issue was related to firewall policies pushed out to our server farm firewall cluster around 12:35pm this afternoon (Potential bug on the management system). This caused several services to stop working. This included access from external and some of our internal networks to www.sjsu.edu, applications that required SSO access and access to a couple of our monitoring systems. Again, access has been restored to all services.

We continue to investigate for a root cause. Over the last couple weeks we have been working with our firewall vendor on a suspected bug that may cause additional information to be pushed out/changed to the policies. As soon as we have an update we will provide one to this distribution list. In the meantime, please let us know if you see any issues with access to the above services from on/off campus.

Again, our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused

Regards,
Jaime (Sanchez)

We received over 40 phone calls and walkups at the ITSS Help Desk during this period, about ten percent of what we would experience had the semester already started.

Oracle gives OpenOffice.org to Apache

According to a June 1 post on ZD Net by David Meyer, "Oracle has ceded control of the OpenOffice.org code base to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator project." This opens up some interesting possibilities for universities and others looking to reduce their dependence on proprietary software. According to Meyer:

OpenOffice.org is the most popular free productivity suite, and a major rival to Microsoft Office. The software giant said it was 'donating' the open-source code so as to "demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities".

If folks look at OpenOffice.org they may find it offers all the features they need without having to deal with licensing fees and complex activation schemes.

Yet another SJSU Phishing Scam

Please be aware of this latest phishing attempt (below). Any e-mail asking for your e-mail password and username are scams. Victor Van Leer of SJSU's University Technology Services has sent out the following:

Q. What can I do if I receive a scam message?
A. If you receive a scam message, please do the following to help stop the scam: Press the down arrow next to the "Reply" button. Click "Report Phishing" This action will move the message to your spam folder, block further attempts and alert the Google anti-phishing team to act on this phishing attempt.

A sample of the latest scam message is included below. It is a scam. Users should not reply to it and they should click "Report Phishing" if they receive the phishing scam email.

Below is a sample of the latest scam message:
Note: This message is a scam.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: (ITSS) Help Desk
Date: Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:18 AM
Subject: 2011 Webmail Upgrade to prevent Account Being Disabbled
To: (deleted)


Attention San José State University email user!

This message is from Information Technology Services, San José State University to all its email Users.We are upgrading to a new email version to help increase the storage megabyte and are therefore deleting all unused email account.

Also be informed of the serious technical difficulty at hand. Our Webmail Database that records your webmail data and profile has just been contrasted by a serious circulating internet virus. As a result we are upgrading to a new email version to help increase the storage megabit and are therefore deleting all unused email account as a result of the nonexistence of users.

To confirm the your account is currently in use and to integrate the recent maintenance carried out in e-mail system and also help in resetting your space in our database and erase the virus circulation in our webmail . reply back with the information as required below;

Username:...
Email:.......
Password: ...
Re confirm Password:....
Date of Birth:....


Warning! Webmail owner that refuses to update their account by providing the requested details above after reading this mail will loose his / her account permanently.

Account Alert Code: X3XX00178SU Thank you for using San José State University®

University Help Desk


A unit of Academic Technology
Clark Hall, Room 102
San José State University
One Washington Square
San José, CA 95192-0026


San José State University - Home of the Spartans
One Washington Square - San José, California USA, 95192
408-924-1000

Please remember, we do not ever ask for passwords via e-mail!