Over the summer, DoIT performed network enhancements in the Physics, Chemistry and ITE buildings on campus. As a result of these upgrades, network speeds should be increased and there will be better wireless performance in these locations.

Wireless density was more than doubled in most locations, leading to improved speeds in classrooms and public spaces throughout these locations. The first floor of Math/Psyc also received wireless enhancements to improve the connectivity in the classrooms located there.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday August 12th, Tuesday August 16th, and Saturday August 20th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are several systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Friday August 12th (work will begin at 5:00pm and conclude by 11:00pm, most systems will only be down a small portion of this time):

• The new web hosting environment will be down (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)

• Student mySQL databases will be offline

• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)

• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched

• Expected to be unreachable from 5pm to 8pm

• All HFS (user) servers will be offline

• Userpages will be unavailable

• License5 will be down (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

• Perseus will be unavailable

Tuesday, August 16th

• RT will be down from 5pm to 7pm

Saturday August 20th (work will begin at 9:00am and conclude by 11:00am with the systems only being down a portion of that time)

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality

• Wiki will be unavailable

• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the Fall. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCWorks to apply. The position will be open for applications until August 8th. (Search for TSC Student Consultant.)

We're looking, specifically, for students who are able to work between the hours below:

• Mondays 8AM-10AM; 12PM-3PM
• Tuesdays 8AM-4PM; 6PM-8PM
• Wednesdays 12PM-6PM
• Thursdays 8AM-3PM

TSC Student Consultant Job Description

Technology Support Center (TSC) student consultants are the first points of technical contact for the UMBC community and those who do well often go on to work in other areas of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Minimally, consultants are expected to provide initial triage and support for a wide-range of information technologies including accounts, hardware, instructional technologies, networking, software, telecommunications, and basic web development.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:

• Provide technical assistance to users by phone, online and in person;
• Answer TSC phones in a professional and courteous manner;
• Create, update and resolve tickets in the Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system;
• Create, update, suggest and recommend relevant FAQ articles to users (www.umbc.edu/faq);
• Provide direct assistance to users on technical issues they cannot easily resolve on their own;
• Complete in-person or online training about quality support as defined in umbc.edu/go/ticketrubric;
• Respond to all work related communications in a timely manner;
• Escalate urgent problems to the Full-Time staff, as appropriate.

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate by phone or in person.
• Demonstrated writing ability.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve successful outcomes in handling difficult situations and customers.
• Demonstrated analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability & willingness to learn coupled with clear understanding of one’s technical abilities, so as to triage and escalate an issue that leads to an effective solution for the user.