Last week, Microsoft released a Windows 7 security update (number KB2823324) which had a bug in it which interacts with certain anti-virus programs to cause systems to behave badly. Among the anti-virus programs most seriously affected are the versions of Kaspersky Anti-virus which the P-A Department has installed on most of its Windows systems. While Microsoft withdrew this security update from general distribution when evidence of the problem started mounting up, many systems' automatic Windows Update settings had already installed the update by that time.

On some systems with the bad update installed, nothing will happen right away. The most usual symptom is that after some future system reboot, the system disk will have CHKDSK run on it as part of the Windows startup process. This, in itself, is generally safe; it just wastes time. On some systems, Kaspersky Anti-virus loses the ability to read its license key and insists on having its license reactivated before running. Once either of these starts happening, it will generally continue to happen after subsequent reboots. In some cases, fortunately rare, additional problems may arise which keep the system from booting successfully altogether.

If your Windows 7 system starts exhibiting any such symptom, please create a helpdesk ticket and we will arrange to come uninstall the buggy security update for you.

UPDATE 2 @ 4:20PM: - All Systems Go,

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UPDATE 2 @ 3:20PM: - S drive and U drive back online, other systems coming online

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UPDATE 1 @ 1:20PM: - Maint window opened, systems going down

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There will be a broad outage Sunday afternoon starting around 1pm and lasting for between 2-3 hours. This is for firmware updates on our storage system and associated components. All connected systems will be down at the time which includes the Shared (S) Drive, the User (U) drive, all virtual machines which includes the VPN, several websites, two of the 3 domain controllers, the print server, helpdesk, all of the Exchange 2013 system (anyone who connects to mail using ‘enterprise’).

The Support.pa.msu.edu website is on a separate system not affected so I will have a status post on there so you can get updates that way. When the maintenance is done I will make a post on there.

A side effect of the recent change to a different system for handling the "www.pa.msu.edu" address is that basic insecure FTP service is not available on that address any more. If you are used to using this service to transfer files to and from the web server, there are two options available to continue to do so.

First, you can use a file transfer program which supports secure FTP (of the 'sftp' type) and connect to the new www.pa.msu.edu with that. Many people already do so, using the department's recommended "SSH Secure File transfer Client" on their Windows system, or with FileZilla, available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, which can be set to use 'sftp' instead of plain FTP. This is the preferred solution, as 'sftp' encrypts the data stream for your transfer connection (while FTP sends everything, including your password, "as is").

The second option is to continue to use plain FTP (and let anyone who is looking at network traffic at the time see your password) and connect to the old server, which is still there, just not using the "www.pa.msu.edu" name. You can connect to it using any of the names "ftp.pa.msu.edu", "force.pa.msu.edu" or "www2.pa.msu.edu" using either insecure FTP or secure sftp.

Most file areas that users can copy files to are available on both the new and the old servers using the same file area names. For example, course materials will go to some subdirectory of /web/documents/courses/current/coursename while personal web pages will go somewhere inside /home/username/www