Tech Alerts

On the evenings of March 14th and 15th, during the NJ campus Spring Break closure, USAN will conduct maintenance on our campus network infrastructure. While we do not expect this work to impact users, it is possible that on-campus users may experience a momentary interruption of internet connectivity as we service their area.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

Microsoft’s new meeting scheduler for Outlook is now available on FDU-owned computers.  The new feature, called Microsoft Scheduling Poll, replaces their legacy solution, Microsoft FindTime. While the interface has improved, the functionality will be familiar to FindTime users. Microsoft Scheduling Poll allows members of our community to offer a poll to their meeting attendees. Attendees can vote to reach a consensus on a preferred meeting time. 

More information on this helpful tool can be found below:

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

As part of our ongoing effort to improve security and functionality, OIRT is pleased to announce Jamf Connect as our authentication tool for FDU Mac computers. Our Jamf Connect deployment will begin on Tuesday, March 5^th. Once it is installed, you will notice a new FDU login screen as shown below. Please note you will continue to use the existing login screen if FileVault 2 is enabled on your machine.

Additionally, there will be an improved menu bar that will allow you to change and sync your password from any location with internet connectivity.

If you receive the following prompt, please enter your NetID and password to sign into Jamf Connect.

Please take a moment to visit our tutorial and familiarize yourself with Jamf connect:

You can also access this documentation by clicking on the Help buttons on the login screen as well as the Get Help button from the new Jamf menu bar on your machine.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

At 2 PM EST, our voicemail service provider, NWN, will perform maintenance on our voicemail system. While we do not anticipate user impact, there is a possibility that users may experience outages. We expect the maintenance to be completed by 2:30 PM EST.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

On Friday, February 16th, between 5 PM and midnight EST, our phone vendor, NWN, will be performing an emergency software security patch of FDU’s Jabber soft phone service. We expect that we will experience a two-hour service disruption at some point during the maintenance window.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

On Monday, an FDU Tech Alert was sent out notifying all users of an outage with our Jabber soft phones. This outage was the result of a cyber attack at our vendor, NWN’s, facility, impacting all their customers, including FDU. Since that time, many of you have opened SAMI support tickets, and we have been communicating updates directly to you through that system.

Throughout the last several days, we have been in constant communication with our vendor, NWN. There have been moments of extreme optimism that the system would be coming up imminently, followed by setbacks that, in some cases, have impacted a greater area of our overall functionality.

At this time, not only have we lost our soft phone functionality, but we have also lost the use of our VoIP door buzzers. Our users can no longer utilize the NWN self-service portal to call forward, and our internal voice services team can no longer make any changes to the system, such as moves, additions, or deletions.

We understand the frustration of our end users, as we are equally frustrated by our inability to assist or provide reasonable workarounds. We understand how impactful this is to some and are constantly pushing our vendor to do everything within their means to get us up and functioning.

Several NWN engineers are working on our specific case. We continue to monitor the situation, in the hopes that NWN will be successful in bringing us back online as swiftly as possible.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

Cybercriminals have recently been abusing TeamViewer with ransomware attacks. While FDU does not have confirmation of breaches within our network, we are taking steps to protect our TeamViewer accounts. At this time, we ask that all FDU TeamViewer users enable multifactor authentication using the Duo Mobile App. On February 15th, 2024, all FDU TeamViewer accounts without multi-factor authentication will be placed on hold until multi-factor authentication is enabled.

For easy setup and configuration, please follow the instructions linked below:

TeamViewer | Activate Two-Factor Authentication

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

On Friday, our phone vendor, NWN, experienced a security incident that initially did not impact FDU. Unfortunately, over the weekend, this incident led to multiple NWN clients, including FDU, losing connection with the Jabber soft phone service.

As of 9:45 AM this morning, the Jabber service is still down. FDU is in contact with NWN on an hourly basis and we are exploring possible workarounds to provide service to our users.

We currently have no further information. If you are affected by the outage, feel free to open a SAMI ticket. We will provide updates to anyone who has a ticket open for Jabber-related issues.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

Starting on Monday, January 29th, FDU OIRT is introducing a new policy to automatically log off users from lab computers with an idle session time of one hour. By implementing this policy, we aim to increase account security, improve availability of lab computers, and reduce power consumption.

As always, we advise you to please save your work, close all applications, and log out of your session before leaving a lab computer. Any work that has not been saved after one hour of idle time will be lost and will not be recoverable.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit SAMI Support, where you can request additional information from UTAC or search our extensive IT knowledge base. While SAMI Support provides the quickest and easiest access to IT support, you can always contact UTAC by phone at (973)-443-8822 or by email at fdutac@fdu.edu.

We have been experiencing intermittent performance issues with the Colleague system.

We need to take down both Colleague and Self Service this evening beginning at 8pm EST to address these issues.

I anticipate both systems being accessible around 11:30 PM tonight.