Kevin McDonalds Blog

ITS life-cycled the core component of the backup environment in July, 2008. The old L700 tape library has been replaced with a Quantum i2000 Scalar tape library which boasts a dozen LTO4 drives, and eleven-hundred tape slots. This new library is a foundational component for future business recoverability for many departments at Vanderbilt.

On July 8th, 2008, the Technical Cyber Security Alert TA08-190B announcing vulnerability within multiple DNS implementations to cache poisoning, including BIND was released. This is the protocol used here at Vanderbilt for Domain Name Resolution. Many technology vendors have released patches for their products to close this major vulnerability. ITS applied the patch to the primary internet-facing DNS servers on July 19^th, 2008.

Earlier this summer, EMC contacted ITS Storage Administration about a bug in a particular version of a hard-disk drive deployed at ITS. This bug caused data corruption when specific conditions occurred. ITS quickly scheduled a Flare code patch that would identify corruption before it occurred and then subsequently replaced the disk drive that was susceptible to the error condition.

The ITS Electronic Message Administration team has upgraded the Proofpoint Email Gateways to version 5.03. This upgrade provided a more granular reputation model, advanced administration GUI and reporting capability.

In a coordinated effort with the Network Security tea, several hand selected websites on the main Vanderbilt web server were used as evaluation content for two web application scanners. These sites were selected because of suspicious log entries for requests to these sites. The scans involved a discovery phase, last minute database backup, an evaluation phase, and a reporting phase. In addition to evaluating the scanning productions, we were also able to pass the findings on to our customers so that they could fix their applications.

This month ITS System Administration completed the year long project to move Server Consoles for HP and IBM servers to a protected and private administration network. This configuration is much more secure than the previous.

This month ITS Storage Administration completed the expansion of the EMC Clariion and Cisco 9509 SAN Directors to support the 1GB VUExchange default mailbox size.

ITS Staff migrated the vunetid server from an out-dated server and up-supported operating system to RedHat Enterprise Linux running on a virtual machine. This has removed dozens of security holes and properly aligned this service with modern infrastructure.

• 166 Magic Tickets were processed in Applications Hosting.
• 34 VUmail to VUExchange Mailbox Migrations
• Two employees attended F5 Load Balancer (Local Traffic Management) training