Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeITS continues work on CardMail improvements
September 25, 2006 —
Information Technology Services has been working on two projects over the course of the past couple of weeks - one of which has operated relatively under the radar and the other of which everyone seems to know about.
Concerning the latter, ITS Director Ken Schindler says ITS has successfully navigated the hundreds of phone calls and e-mails it has received since Sept. 15 from students, faculty, and staff who had some sort of difficulty with the recent mandated password change.
Schindler said that the process of implimenting the password change has run relatively smoothly, though he did say that there were a couple of technical issues that were dealt with during the change.
"One thing we weren't able to do was grace logins," he said.
"Grace" logins allow an individual who used their old password to log into the network a predetermined number of times before being blocked from the system until a password change is detected.
As a result of the lack of grace logins, a fair number of phone calls ended up being directed to Schindler's office.
"I'm close personal friends with a lot of students," he joked.
In 2002, Congress passed a bill in the wake of the Enron collapse called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA). SOA requires companies to run their financial divisions as transparently and securely as possible and provides standards by which independent auditing firms must operate.
The act is predominately geared towards private industry, and especially financial firms.
Increasingly, though, universities - which often possess some sensitive financial information - are seeing how SOA can affect them.
Schindler said that this was part of the logic behind the password change.
"It's a cultural shift," he said. "I had to change my password too."
The other project which ITS has been working on is the gradual cleanup of the CardMail database.
The deletion of all unopened, 90-day-old e-mail has been running as a background service for a little under a week.
"It's cleaning out a lot of stuff," Schindler said.
The upcoming deletion of all opened, 365-day-old e-mail should free up over half of the available space on the CardMail server.
"All in all," Schindler said, "it's going fairly well.”