[ANNOUNCE] Network Maintenance

CTS will be performing maintenance on the campus data network tomorrow, Wednesday, November 4, 2015. Work will begin at 6:00 P. M. and be restricted to administrative areas until 9:00 P. M. After 9:00 P. M. academic buildings will experience brief outages as network hardware is updated. These outages will be localized, but complete; resulting in no network or phone access until the updates are finished. A blog post will be made when the maintenance window is closed and all service should be back to normal. As always, please report any problems you have with CTS-provided and -supported devices and/or services to the CTS Helpdesk: helpdesk@potsdam.edu or x-4444 (315/267-4444)

[ANNOUNCE] AFP Connections to Helios

On November 16th 2015, CTS will discontinue Potsdam’s support for Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) service to Helios. AFP is Apple’s legacy file sharing protocol that is being phased out of OS X in favor of the more common Server Message Block (SMB). Connecting to Helios with SMB is almost exactly the same as AFP. Instead of connecting with afp://helios.potsdam.edu, simply use smb://helios.potsdam.edu instead. Detailed connection instructions can be found here: http://www.potsdam.edu/cts/services/helios/windowsosx.cfm Why the change? Over the last four years Apple has steadily migrated OS X away from using AFP as the default protocol, instead standardizing on SMB. SMB has been the default connection method for the last two Mac OS X operating systems, Yosemite (10.10) & El Capitan (10.11). All OS X versions have been able to utilize SMB effectively since OS X 10.7. With this change, Helios will now use a single protocol to communicate with all campus computers. This simplification will improve the maintainability and security of Helios. If you use AFP to connect to Helios, please change to SMB at your earliest convenience. If you encounter problems, as always please contact the CTS Helpdesk: helpdesk@potsdam.edu or extension 4444.