Ok, lets get the important things out of the way first. Infamous pr0n stars is experiencing technical difficulties, so I’ll post a few goodies that should be there. Welcome Nick (aka BDR), Bud (aka Shifty), and Jason (aka SapSparky) to ips. We’re very delighted to have you aboard. Now, one of the main reasons we have these 3 newcomers aboard is because both Michael (aka lastwurm) and I have decided Halo is the new ips game of choice. Yes, it’s that good. Would I lie to you? Oh, and we have a server running. Currently it’s called ips_Halo. Its IP is 199.218.8.72 (I believe). It’s full 90% of the time, so keep it that way 🙂
In other news, the exchange migration went, well…umm, well, it’s done. Needless to say it didn’t go as smoothly as I had anticipated, but that was sort of expected since it IS exchange. It took a little (read, a LOT) of finessing, but it’s up and running. It’s one of those things that takes a lot of time to get working right, but once it’s up and running you won’t have to touch it. I suppose I can live with that.
Now, on to not so pleasant news. Yesterday when I went into work, I had a few emails from University Security waiting for me in my mailbox. Never a good thing ;). Apparantly a DIA (Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, where I work) sanctioned spam was sent out to LOTS of people. Thankfully it wasn’t being sent off one of our servers, but since it was about sports, DIA was to blame. It was infact sent by a DIA dept, but that’s just the beginning. When I checked the mail-enabled public folder that the email had in its from field, it was 7MB. This is 7MB larger than it was when Nick and I were checking it the day before at around 3PM. The email that was sent was maybe 100KB in size. Needless to say it was ugly. Apparantly security got wind of the spam because some people had complained to them about this unwanted mailing. Namely all of the students on campus. What happened, was we have an outside vendor that takes care of selling tickets online. Well, a different dept contacted this vendor to see if they could help them send out a newsletter. Needless to say the vendor didn’t contact the lady that’s in charge of ticket sales here, so the vendor just took all the email addresses they had on their ticket sales servers. Normally this would be fine. If somebody signs up for something with an email address it’s fair game. However, in order to provide the student discount to season tickets ordered online, the Office of Admissions and Records (OAR) provided the lady in charge of tickets with a dump of all the current students’ UIN number (the number on their ID card). Apparantly with that dump came with netids/email addresses. OAR explicitly forbade the lady at the ticket office from using the email addresses for and sort of emailing. For all we know, she may have signed an agreement with them. I’m sure you see the problem now…the vendor used ALL those email addresses in the newsletter without even contacting the ticket sales lady. Needless to say she’s in a shit-ton of problems right now. Then to top this already huge fiasco, this emailing was a one time only email which asked if you wanted to opt-in. However, all the links for the vast majority of the people DIDN’T EVEN WORK. This occured because some of the email addresses were sent in all caps. Apparantly the vendor’s software solution didn’t recognize the email addresses when they were in all caps. *sigh* Apparantly there’s a meeting with the CIO tomorrow along with Security. I still don’t know if I’m apart of that meeting or not. Either way it should be fun.