Evolving IS&T support for Red Hat Linux
Red Hat, Inc. ended support for Red Hat Linux 9 on April 30. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is the successor product. Through a recently signed volume license, MIT is entitled to run Red Hat Enterprise WS on an unlimited number of personally owned systems. In addition, the volume license allows MIT to run Red Hat Enterprise AS, ES or WS on 1,000 systems purchased by MIT or affiliated departments, labs and centers.
IS&T plans to roll out Help Desk support for Red Hat Enterprise 3 some time in June. Support for several Linux applications will follow. For now, IS&T will continue to provide "best-effort" support for Red Hat 9. For more details about Red Hat Linux distribution, updates and support, go to http://web.mit.edu/ist/news/headlines/redhat.html.
Introducing Ed Tech Times
IS&T Academic Computing has launched Ed Tech Times at http://edtech.mit.edu/times. This interactive, online publication replaces The Insider, a print newsletter for MIT faculty and instructional staff. Ed Tech Times covers developments in academic computing in MIT departments, labs and centers. Submissions of educational technology news from campus organizations are welcome, as are reader comments.
To learn more about submitting material, go to the web site above and click on the "About the Ed Tech Times" link.
TechTime offered for Palm PDAs
IS&T recently announced availability and support of Oracle Calendar Sync 9.0.4 for Palm, which lets you synchronize your MIT TechTime calendar with the Date Book on a Palm PDA. The TechTime on Oracle Calendar desktop clients are not required.
Synchronization clients for Mac OS X and Windows 2000 and XP Professional are available at no charge to members of the MIT community. To download these installers, go to the MIT Software page at http://web.mit.edu/software.
For details on Palm synchronization, including system requirements, see http://itinfo.mit.edu/product?vid=616 for Mac OS X users, or http://itinfo.mit.edu/product?vid=617 for Windows users. For more information on the TechTime service, go to http://web.mit.edu/ist/services/calendaring/techtime.html.
Don't fall for e-mail hoaxes
Junk e-mail (spam) now includes hoax mail that aims to elicit a response from the recipient, such as sending money or opening an e-mail attachment that contains a virus. Hoax e-mail doesn't always appear to come from unknown sources; e-mail addresses can be spoofed.
What if "admin@mit.edu" sends an e-mail requiring you to respond or your e-mail account will be shut off? When in doubt, ask. Contact your local computer administrator to verify the message, or call the Help Desk at 253-1101. Don't think you're wasting someone's time by verifying an e-mail message. It takes a minute to find out whether or not an e-mail is a hoax, but it can take hours to repair a virus-infected system.
For the latest on e-mail hoaxes and viruses, visit http://vil.nai.com/vil/default.asp, http://www.f-secure.com, or http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org. For more guidelines on handling incoming e-mail, read the IS&T article at http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v19/n04/190404.html.
Digitalk is compiled by Information Services and Technology.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 12, 2004 (download PDF).
