Duke OIT – Inbox February 2008

The OIT Newsletter

• Unity for Duke voice mail
• Forgot your password? Forget about it
• Hunting spam at Duke
• OIT nets big phish 
• Fight spam: Filter your Duke email 
• iPhone billing made simple
  
• New data center smashes barrier
• Alert: Some pagers must be exchanged
  

Unity for Duke's voice mail

OIT has begun consolidating multiple voice mail systems at Duke into a new single system called Unity. The transition will take about seven months. When it’s complete, everyone at Duke will be on the same voice mail system.

Unity will provide a consistent system across Duke that can be upgraded as needed. It allows users to transfer voice mail messages anywhere within the university and access voice mail from any touch tone phone in the world. It offers the features available on the old systems plus new services.

OIT is first launching Unity’s voice mail features. After the initial cutover to one system, OIT will launch “convergence-based unified messaging.” It will enable users to link their voice mail with other services such as email, instant messaging and mobile devices. OIT also plans to implement a Web-based service that will allow users to control their voice mail settings and other telephone features online.

The Unity Telephone User Interface (TUI) – the options a user hears when calling the system – is user friendly and intuitive. Users can access the TUI from any phone anywhere. All users will dial one number (613-6245, or 613-MAIL on a traditional phone pad) to retrieve messages.

Unity conversion schedule:

• Approximately 800 users at Hock I, Hock II, Wachovia Tower and Erwin Terrace transitioned to Unity in September 2007.
• The American Tobacco Campus cut over to Unity on January 28, 2008.
• The rest of the Duke community, including the Medical Center, will switch to the system over the next seven months.

OIT will convert about 2,000 users a month to Unity beginning in February 2008. The rollout schedule is posted on www.oit.duke.edu/voicemail.

February rollouts include:

• DUMAC – 2/8/08
• Financial Services, Washington Building – 2/13/08
• Financial Services, 705 Broad St. – 2/20/08

Departments tentatively scheduled to switchover in March are:

• Academic Council
• Academic Resource Center
• Aerospace Studies
• African, African-American Studies
• Alumni Affairs
• American Dance
• Art & Art History Department
• Arts & Sciences
• Asian African Languages & Literature

On the morning of a conversion, OIT personnel will be in your department to answer questions, assist users as needed and make this as hassle-free an experience as possible.

To learn more about Unity Voice Mail, visit www.oit.duke.edu/voicemail. If you have a question that isn’t answered on the Web page, contact the OIT Service Desk at (919) 684-2200.

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Forget your password? Forget about it

If ever there was a bane of online existence, it’s the forgotten password. At Duke, in fact, the number one reason people call the OIT Service Desk is to change their NetID password, which gives them access to email and all of the other tools they use on the university network. Duke users already have the ability to change their passwords any time at Online@Duke. But what do you do if you don’t remember your password?

In an ongoing effort to enable the campus community to serve itself whenever practical, OIT has now made it possible for Duke network users to bypass the Service Desk and reset their own passwords even if they have forgotten them. To reset your NetID password, visit the NetID Password Reset page.

In order to use this handy service, users will have to set up a prompt question for themselves. At the Online@Duke home page, click on Challenge/Response Verification in the NetID Services box.

Once they’ve established their question, users will simply have to remember the answer. Questions available include, for example, “What was the name of your elementary school?”

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Hunting spam at Duke

Email advertisements for cheap drugs, offers to share millions of dollars with deposed Nigerian officials and embarrassing offers from singles dying to meet you. Why do we get so much of it? What can we do to stop it?

A year ago, Duke’s policy was to not reject any incoming email messages at its gateway based on their address of origin. But something had to be done about the avalanche of spam, so OIT put new spam filters in place. Six months ago 5 million messages a day were stopped based on their origin. Currently, 29 million a day are stopped. The blocked messages come from addresses that can be found on commercially available lists of known spammers, as well as lists that OIT has compiled.

Also a year ago, OIT discarded 1 million to 2 million messages a day based on scans of know spam content phrases. Today it discards 500,000 per day. The numbers have gone down as spammers have received return messages that their emails have been rejected, and then moved on to more fertile ground.

Last year, OIT delivered 2 million to 3 million email messages a day to Duke students and staff. Today, it delivers 1 million, having trimmed away spam. And Duke students and staff are also sending less spam.

Duke users are sending spam? According to Chris Colomb, OIT senior analyst for emails and messaging services, Duke students and staff are unwary purveyors of spam, as spammers have become sophisticated at controlling computers from afar. OIT scans outgoing email volume from Duke, with an eye for mass mailings.

Can spam be blocked altogether? Some Duke students and staff have begun moving to services like Google’s Gmail, with its very sensitive and effective filters. Though a convenient and powerful service, Gmail lacks email features that are essential to university environments, and users must weigh convenience against the risk of unreliable transmission of emails for sensitive, deadline-driven research communications, emergency communications or other university activities.

For example, it is unlikely that commercial services would take the time to comply with Institutional Review Board policies for research confidentiality in communications. Also, if filters at another institution are rejecting your outgoing messages, these services are unlikely to intervene to make sure your messages are allowed in. OIT, on the other hand, can work with other institutions to ensure your mail reaches its destination. And if you accidentally delete an email you had meant to save, OIT will retrieve it, while other service providers will not. It’s the difference between using commercial services designed very effectively for very focused use and an in-house service that can provide flexibility and responsiveness to its home institution.

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OIT nets big phish

Late last month, Duke was the target of tens of thousands of email messages that appeared to be from Duke itself, complete with “@duke.edu” return addresses, asking email account holders to respond and supply passwords or be cut off from their email.

OIT worked over the weekend and into the following weeks to block the emails specifically, tighten spam filters generally and help individuals who had responded to the bogus messages. Such incidents, in which a person posing as a legitimate party fishes for private information via email, are known as “phishing.”

“Any time we got a new phishing address reported we blocked it and any responses immediately,” said Klara Jelinkova, director of computing systems at OIT. This became tricky and laborious because “the attackers continuously changed their addresses. Ultimately OIT had to deploy site-specific filters that concentrated on more than just the email address in order to stop the attack.”

Jelinkova said the episode, which targeted several colleges and universities, served as a vivid reminder to be vigilant for fraud and to never respond to requests for personal information solicited over email. OIT never requests account information or verification through email.

People who use OIT-provided email “can go to Online@Duke and tighten their anti-spam settings,” she said. “And if they fear their password has been compromised, they can also change that at Online@Duke.” OIT has also added an anti-spam button to the top of the Duke Web Mail page that directs users to their spam-filtering settings.

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Fight spam: Filter your Duke email

Duke’s email system scans incoming messages for certain words and phrases common to spam and flags them. You have the ability to filter the mail that you receive based on these flags. With the recent dramatic increase in phishing and spam, now is a good time for Duke email users to review their spam settings by visiting Online@Duke. There you can set preferences to keep spam out of your inbox or block email from certain senders.

Get started

1. Go to https://webacct.acpub.duke.edu/online/
2. Click on “Filter your email” in the “E-mail services” box
   
3. Log in with your Net ID and password

Understand your options

You will now see your current email filtering settings. Available settings include:

1. spam_high:  Duke’s mail servers attempt to identify a message as spam or legitimate. This filter applies to messages that almost certainly are junk mail. While we can never be completely sure, it is very unlikely that valid mail will match this filter.
2. spam_medium: This filter applies to messages that our servers think is probably junk mail, but are not fully certain. There is a reasonable chance that some valid mail will be stopped by this filter. 

 

You can choose the following actions for the both the medium- and the high-rated spam.

1. deliver: Messages will be delivered normally.
2. discard: Messages will be thrown away, will never appear to the user and are effectively gone for good.
3. file: Rather than being stored in the normal INBOX, the messages will be stored in a subfolder named "junk mail." If this folder doesn’t exist, it will be created.

Take action

To change your settings, choose the action that you want to take from the Action drop-down boxes for the two levels of spam. After you’ve made your choices, click Submit.

You can also specify actions for email from specific email addresses. Enter the email address you want to block and choose the type of action to perform for email arriving from that address. Please enter only one address at a time.

You may use wildcards (* and ?) in email addresses. For example: *@yahoo.com will block all mail from any @yahoo.com address.

When you’ve entered the email address and chosen the action to perform for that address, click the “Add” button. The email address must include both a local part and a domain (must be of the form “local@domain”).

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iPhone billing made simple

Duke employees who sat out the Apple iPhone rollout because the charges for university business couldn’t be paid by their department take note: Now you can have your iPhone and pay for it through Duke, too.

Apple and its wireless service provider, AT&T, have begun allowing corporate billing, which means that Duke faculty and staff can now request service through OIT and have the charges for business accounts paid automatically by their departments.  Check with your local IT support to make sure the iPhone will work with your departmental email before ordering. 

If you couldn’t wait to get an iPhone for university business and have been getting reimbursed for charges, send an email to atthelp@duke.edu and ask about switching to a departmental account. For more information on using your iPhone at Duke, read about iPhone compatibility at Duke. To request a new iPhone, use the online order form. Note: The iPhone is listed as a data device.

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New data center smashes barrier

A lot of people won't notice, and that's good. Around the time winter turns to spring, a switch will be flicked in a basement of East Fitzpatrick building, and critical, central data centers for the university and Duke University Health System will be united. For most faculty, students and staff, it will be business as usual above ground. That’s part of the point – their work should be uninterrupted. But the collaboration and the state-of-the-art facility are firsts for the university.

The university–Health System collaboration is built atop an earlier partnership. Go back to 2006. The Pratt School of Engineering was seeking to upgrade its own data center, and OIT needed space to expand the university’s enterprise data center, which processes everything from payroll to human resource records. Pratt offered OIT space in its West Fitzpatrick building center, and in return, OIT offered to upgrade the center’s infrastructure – wiring, fire protection, redundant power and more. It was to be a temporary move for OIT in a long-time effort to consolidate the university’s data operations.

Fast forward into early 2007. Duke Health Technology Solutions (DHTS) learned that the home of the medical center’s central data center – Bell Building – is to be demolished in summer 2008. It sits right between Duke Hospital and Duke Clinics, a roadblock to hospital expansion. DHTS's servers needed a new home.

While working on the joint Pratt-OIT facility in West Fitzpatrick, OIT learned that Pratt also had undeveloped lower-level space in East Fitzpatrick. Tracy Futhey, vice president and CIO of information technology on the university side, and Asif Ahmad, who holds the same positions in the Health System, met with university and health system administrators in order to accomplish something rarely done: break down the walls between the two large Duke enterprises and build and maintain a facility collaboratively. The trustees approved, construction began and phase one will be complete in March 2008.

The data center will include redundant, independent power sources, an advanced temperature control system that will allow heat-producing server racks to be packed densely in the space, all-overhead wiring for ease of access and maximum use of space and other features that leave technophiles wide-eyed. The collaboration allowed OIT to build in features it would not have built had it developed the center on its own, for example, larger uninterrupted-power units. All this probably won't register on most people above ground. They'll never notice. That's good.

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Alert: Some pagers must be exchanged

Duke’s wide-area paging vendor, USA Mobility, will soon upgrade its paging network in our area. The upside: newer technology to enhance services. The downside: some devices are on either a soon-to-be-obsolete frequency or a formatting protocol that will no longer be supported.

OIT and USA Mobility will be on-site in February to exchange the affected devices for new pagers. The pager numbers and functionality for these units will not change.

Please note:  Only users that receive a direct page and/or email regarding this exchange are affected.

OIT staff will be in the following locations on the dates indicated from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. We strongly encourage you to exchange your pager on one of these days. In order to exchange a pager, you must bring your Duke ID and current pager. Managers or their designees are responsible for exchanging “functional” pagers (those not assigned to an individual).

Tues., Feb. 19     Duke Hospital Cafeteria
Wed., Feb. 20     Duke Hospital Cafeteria
Thurs., Feb. 21    Duke Hospital Cafeteria
Tues., Feb. 26     Duke Clinic Cafeteria
Wed., Feb. 27     Duke Clinic Cafeteria

If you are unable to exchange your pager during these days, please make your exchange at the OIT Wireless Service Center, 200 Facilities Building, Coal Pile Drive (map).

If you have any questions regarding this information, please contact the OIT Wireless Service Center at (919) 684-2200, option 2.

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