Scheduled Maintenance to Impact Several Penn State Access Account-related Services, Beginning December 17, 2005

On Saturday, December 17, 2005, Academic Services and Emerging Technologies (ASET), a unit of Information Technology Services, will perform a two-level maintenance upgrade to the dce.psu.edu authentication cell. As a result, several services reliant upon Penn State's digital identity management infrastructure will be unavailable, as noted below. Please note that in order to insure optimal maintenance conditions, Penn State Access Account joins will be suspended as of 4:00 p.m. on Friday, December 16.

Beginning on Saturday, December 17 at 5:00 p.m. the following services that support and facilitate the management aspect of Penn State's digital identity service will be disabled:

• the "Change Your E-mail Forwarding" and "Change Your Password" utilities via the ITS Secure Server
• Penn State Directory information updates, via CACTUS and ITS Secure Server
• the Vacation e-mail auto-reply service for faculty and staff
• the Identity Management (IdM) Center
• the Security Interface
• Penn State Access Account Signature Stations at all Penn State locations
• Short Term Access Account (STAA) Creation Interface
• the PALS interface for accounts
• Interface to the Central ID Repository (CIDR) for adding new PSU IDs, as well as adds and lookups

These services, including account joins, will be fully restored by 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, December 20.

The second part of the maintenance procedure will continue on Sunday, December 18 beginning at 5:00 a.m., and will impact end-user services that rely heavily on DCE authentication and/or file service via DFS/PASS, including:

• Penn State WebMail
• the Penn State Portal
• Access to the PASS Gateway via Samba at win.pass.psu.edu
• Personal Web server

These services will be fully restored as soon as possible.

Please note, however, that any other services reliant upon DCE and/or DFS may be subject to intermittent outages, including but not limited to:

• eLion
• World Campus courses
• Web services using PASS to serve files, including Departmental and Course space (in addition to Personal, as noted above)
• E-mail services via mail.psu.edu
• Access to Classroom and Lab Computing (CLC) machines
• Services using Penn State WebAccess
• ITS Dial-up
• VPN access
• Secure file transfer via the PASS Gateway, Portal's PASS Explorer, sftp.personal.psu.edu, and or SSH
• Access to the ITS UNIX Cluster machines
• Oracle Collaboration Suite Calendar (via the native client or Web server)
• OHR services that require authentication, such as the Employee Benefits system, the Electronic Job Management System (EJMS), and Internal Staff job postings)
• id+online
• Any service that goes against the Generalized Interface (GI)

It is very likely that any outage time for services of this type will be very brief, perhaps only a few minutes, but additional time has been allotted for any maintenance-related troubleshooting that may need to occur.

Questions and requests for assistance related to this outage should be directed to ITS Help Desk staff at helpdesk@psu.edu. We apologize if this causes any inconvenience to you/your staff. Thank you for your patience during this time.