As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure will be conducting its quarterly patching of systems.  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 22nd, 6pm to 12am

• 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 6pm to 8pm

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

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

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

• All HFS (user) servers will be offline

• Student mySQL databases will be offline

• RT will be down (expected to be down 6pm to 8pm)

• Userpages will be unavailable

• Wiki will be unavailable

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

• Student mySQL databases will be offline

• Perseus will be unavailable

There will be no data loss during the outage and no user action is required prior to the downtime. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Technology Support Center at x53838.

The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the Fall semester. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCworks to apply.

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 inumbc.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.