Service Status

Due to a recent  Microsoft security update, some users may experience issues opening attachments from certain emails.

This issue appears to only affect attachments on emails that are formatted as ‘Rich Text’. This is not the default setting for Outlook but users external to the University using a different email client, or anyone who has changed the default settings, will potentially be sending emails with attachments that cannot be opened.

As a workaround, you can login to your email account at mail.bham.ac.uk in a web browser and this will allow you to save the attachments. Alternatively, Microsoft have detailed some additional workarounds on their support site, which you can use until they release a patch to fix the issue.

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Due to our ongoing issue with the WiFi on campus, many users may find that their Mac computers are not connecting to Eduroam or UoBwifi. IT Services apologises for the inconvenience and are working on a fix for this issue.

In this case please get in touch with the IT Service Desk and we will do our best to provision a connection for you.

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Update 20/02/2017

We are still investigating the issue affecting Mac Devices. There is currently no ETA in place but we hope to have it resolved sooner rather than later.

We apologise for the continued interruption of service.

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We are currently aware of two issues with the chargeable printing system for students:

For some machines, the campus print release printer will not appear at all.

As a workaround, run CMD on the PC you are using, and run the following command:

gpupdate /force

This will update the machine and should make the printer appear again (note: you may have to attempt this a couple of times).

Due to recent updates, Adobe is not always able to detect Campus Print Release.

In order to print PDF files, please follow these workarounds:

right click on the document->hover over Open With->two options:

->1. click on Tex works (just a different PDF viewer)-> click File-> click Print-> select Campus Print Release

->2. click Word-> click OK on pop-up-> click File->click print->click enable printing->under Printer select Campus Print Release

We are working to fix this issue as soon as possible.

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Dear all,

Due to urgent maintenance work required on our wireless network there may be small interruptions to the wireless service on the below dates;

• Monday 19^th June
• Tuesday 20^th June
• Thursday 22^nd June
• Tuesday 27^th June
• Thursday 29^th June
• Tuesday 3^rd July

The work will take place between 5pm and 7pm on the dates above, please note if you experience a wireless drop out to your connection during these times you should be redirected within a minute.

Many thanks for you cooperation

IT Services Network Team

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The Virtualisation Service will be undergoing maintenance from 10:00 until 14.00 on Wednesday 28^th  June 2017 and will be at risk throughout this period.  Access via vCloud (Embotics vCommander) will not be available, please access your VMs via your remote access methods (RDP for Windows/SSH for Linux) . During this maintenance period, virtual machines will continue to function as normal so there will be no guest downtime. Please see change ref: CHG44412 for further details.

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A new NeXtScale-based version of BlueBEAR is now live.

The new cluster has a number of notable features, including more cores and memory per node, larger ‘large’ memory nodes and a new automated workload manager along with some tweaks to the way the resource is shared.

The underlying principles remain the same but we are expecting to see benefits, particularly to the throughput of the high number of short running or single core jobs resulting from the removal of the limitation that only a single user can have access to a node.

For more information please see https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/it/teams/infrastructure/research/bear/bluebear/BlueBEAR3/index.aspx

If you do get issues then please log a call via the IT ServiceDesk.

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IT Services are about to begin this year’s process for requesting software for managed PC clusters.

As we did last year we’ll be building the setup based on requests we receive through the Service Desk, requests from last year will not be rolled into this year’s setup to ensure we only install what’s required and have the latest or correct versions in place.

When completing the request process in ServiceNow please indicate if software titles are required in college PC clusters as well as the centrally managed open access areas. We can then ensure any relevant college teams are included in the request process.

For the next academic year we’d like to be in a position where all software required is installed, tested and confirmed as working in early September. We’ll then distribute this setup to all IT Services PC clusters, Libraries and learning suites before Welcome Week begins.

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