Service Status

We are currently investigating issues with access to student filestores. Our technical teams are dealing with this as a high priority.

11:09am: We have now fixed this issue, please reboot your device to gain access to your filestore. Apologies for the disruption.

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We are currently aware of an issue where users are unable to sign into Zoom/join Zoom meetings from University Machines, receiving Error Code: 5003.

In most cases, this is because an outdated version of Zoom is being used and the solution for this is to update to the latest version, available from Software Center.

Please note that you will need to be either on campus or connected to the Remote Access Client to be able to use the Software Center successfully.

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There have been recent reports of problems accessing https://zoom.us and https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us from China.

If you find that access to these sites are blocked, please do the following to access meetings, teaching events and the Zoom client:

To join a meeting:

• If an invite utilizes a “zoom.us” URL for joining, you will need to manually input the meeting id at https://zoom.com/join

To login to Zoom:

• To sign in to an account, please navigate to https://zoom.com to login

To download the Zoom client software:

• Please visit https://zoom.com/download to download the latest Zoom application to connect to Zoom Meetings and Webinars in China.

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IT Services are currently receiving many queries about the release of student timetable information and how timetables can be accessed.

To answer our most frequently asked questions, we have produced the following article:

https://kb.bham.ac.uk/KB15119

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Our Remote Access Service allows you to access your University files and data wherever you are. The service can be accessed on any computer running Windows, macOS or Linux.

**Make sure that you are registered for Remote Access Service in advance**

For off-campus access, you will also require a smartphone that has a Two-Factor-Authentication (2FA) application installed such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator.

Information and guidance about working remotely from home is available at KB14867.

For other related issues, please make sure you have read the latest University Coronavirus FAQs available at https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/coronavirus/index.aspx

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We recently announced pending OS upgrades to most BEAR services towards the end of the year. As part of this upgrade, we will be moving the scheduler to Slurm version 20, and we are planning to upgrade Slurm on our existing OS first. We do not anticipate any user facing changes but the update ensures we have access to the latest features, security updates and support for the next OS upgrades.

This upgrade is planned for Thursday 5^th November. Slurm compute nodes and controllers will be unavailable from about 10am that day, probably for most of the day.

Login nodes and RDS Datastore access will remain available, as well as BEARCloud VM, so you will be able to access your data throughout. Job submission will not be available, and no jobs will run, but the queue state at the time of the outage will be maintained after the update is complete.

As the outage date approaches, you will be able to submit long jobs, but if they cannot finish before 5/11/20 they will not start until after the upgrade is complete and jobs are re-enabled. So if your job won’t start in the next couple of weeks, try submitting a shorter job if you can.

Many thanks,

ARC Team

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We have recently upgraded our web single sign-on service (Shibboleth) to integrate with Microsoft 365, so there is a change to how you login to services that use it such as Canvas, Findit@Bham, New Core, and others.

You will see a new login screen, and instead of using your username you will need to use your full University of Birmingham e-mail address. Additionally, if you are an external user who has a canvas-only account these have be logged in as shown below.

Here are examples of the login format:

Staff: J.Bloggs@bham.ac.uk

Students: ABC123@student.bham.ac.uk

Alumni: ABC123@alumni.bham.ac.uk

Canvas-Only (iVLE): ivle-12345@bham.ac.uk

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