I just received a spam email from my own address

Posted on 2013-03-08 by Guy Edwards

Our team was asked to answer some queries about how it’s possible to receive mail that has been forged as being from your email address. This article slightly overlaps with a previous article in 2011 that covered similar ground. Please note … Continue reading →

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Migrations

Posted on 2013-01-31 by Guy Edwards

In December and January we’ve completed some service migrations, we’ve been auditing some services and some new staff members have joined our team, which makes this a good time to clarify what it means to have a migration completed. Although … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices, Documentation, General Maintenance | Comments Off on Migrations

Chris Cooper (pod)

Posted on 2013-01-28 by Guy Edwards

Chris Cooper (nicknamed ‘pod’, with deliberate lower case) joined our team in the past year on secondment from the Systems Development team where his main work for the department had been (such as on the site wide Single Sign On … Continue reading →

Posted in General Maintenance | 1 Comment

The Business Case for Single Sign on

Posted on 2012-12-17 by Guy Edwards

The intended audience for this document is appliance and software product vendors. The background is we’d like appliance vendors to support Single Sign On mechanisms natively. SSO? Yes, we already support LDAP and Active Directory against which to authenticate logins to … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices | 2 Comments

NTP service changes Nov 2012

Posted on 2012-11-15 by Guy Edwards

Over the next month we’ll be doing some work to consolidate our NTP stratum 2 and 3 services into what will hopefully (subject to antenna installation) be a four system stratum 1 service. All historical IP addresses and DNS names … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices, General Maintenance, NTP | 1 Comment

Maintenance Work On Eduroam

Posted on 2011-09-01 by Guy Edwards

Just a slightly uneventful blog post aimed at our IT staff in colleges, departments and other units to let you know about some of the grittier routine work on Eduroam. This is a warts and all account of real life … Continue reading →

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The Week Before World IPv6 Day

Posted on 2011-06-03 by Guy Edwards

So the big news is that as of this morning www.ox.ac.uk / ox.ac.uk has AAAA records and is hence reachable via IPv6, so currently the university IPv6 presence for World IPv6 day will be: Websites www.ox.ac.uk www.maths.ox.ac.uk (plus subsites) www.maths-in-industry.org … Continue reading →

Posted in IPv6 | 1 Comment

Joe Job Spam Run

Posted on 2011-05-03 by Guy Edwards

The university received two spam run campaigns, the first uses a forged sender to make a university address look like the sender, the second uses forged university addresses (i.e. not accounts) in an outgoing campaign to other sites, resulting in … Continue reading →

Posted in Mail Relay | 2 Comments

DNS troubleshooting

Posted on 2011-03-02 by Guy Edwards

I thought I’d write a quick reference for support staff not familiar with DNS troubleshooting The basics: DNS requests query a server to ask, for instance, what the IP address of a website is, when all you know is the … Continue reading →

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IPv6 Stateful Active/Standby Failover with Cisco ASAs

Posted on 2011-01-28 by Guy Edwards

There was some debate on the Cisco ASA failover situation with regard to IPv6. Since we’re potentially about to make a interim firewall purchase for the main university IPv6 traffic (we route IPv6 separately to IPv4 to avoid a limitation … Continue reading →

Posted in Cisco Networks, Firewall, IPv6 | 1 Comment