Kevin McDonalds Blog

ITS has released the Virtual Machine snapshot service. The "Snapshot Service" provides a snapshot of a real-time live image of a guest O/S system disk (or Hard Disk Drive) for a Virtual Machine. The frequency of the snapshot is recommended to be weekly at a cost of $150 yearly. The snapshot service is only offered to Virtual Machines. ITS System Administrators have created virtual server snapshots for multiple customers, including several for the Law School. These snapshots have proven beneficial in projects such as Sharepoint, where restoring from a snapshot has saved the project hours of rebuilding effort in re-establishing the test environment. The primary usage of snapshots is reverting to a previous state of the host operating system. This is useful for recovery from a bad change or a intrusion.

ITS Database Administrators upgraded the Nettracker web server oracle client and Nettracker Oracle database versions applying several patches that will increase the security of the data kept on this system.

ITS Staff have moved the Media Streaming Infrastructure components outside of the ITS Firewalls. This move should provide improved network bandwidth to the Media Streaming Infrastructure which better prepares Vanderbilt University for the upcoming commencement ceremonies. These servers are now protected by host based firewalls instead of the previous setup.

The cohosted web servers were patched to current RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 standards. These are instrumental in enhancing the security and performance of these servers.

ITS hosts web sites for many different departments with various levels of expertise in web site development and maintenance. As a result of an incident investigation, our administrators identified 987 sites that were open to vulnerabilities, and notified their owners (45). We also upgraded one user application that had a vulnerability and shut down 2 sites that could not be fixed and made the environment for all web site owners vulnerable.

• 151 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
• 11 IMAP to Exchange Mailbox Migrations
• 1 staff obtained Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS)
• 1 staff upgraded Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer to 2003.