News

The Information Security Symposium at UC Davis, a popular and low-cost source of ideas, new information and networking for UC security and compliance professionals, is now accepting proposals for the 2019 conference.

The event occurs June 18-19 on the Davis campus. Registration will cost $125, although the fee will be waived for presenters.

This year’s theme is Connect, Share, Fortify. Sessions will focus on:

If you’re using CrashPlan to back up data on your desktop computer at UC Davis, this change won’t affect you. But if you use the service to back up servers, then you need to find an alternative.

Aggie Desktop, an emerging service, improves the way the campus manages desktop computing environments for staff and faculty by offering a common set of hardware, software and processes. The leadership and support of the service are similarly collaborative, drawing from the talents of four large academic and administrative organizations: The College of Engineering; Finance, Operations and Administration; the College of Letters and Science; and Information and Educational Technology.

If you have a 916 area code number, get ready to change your dialing habits and perhaps update your saved or programmed phone numbers.

Starting Feb. 10, when you call from a 916 number, you must include the area code of the number you’re dialing for the call to go through. Instead of dialing seven digits, you’ll dial 1 + ten.

For example, to reach UC Davis Health, you’ll dial 1-916-734-2011. Simply dialing 734-2011 won’t work anymore.

Several important UC Davis services were unavailable starting at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20, when a construction project in downtown Sacramento severed a fiber-optic cable that carries network traffic to and from the Sacramento data center used by UC Davis.
 
Computing accounts, Banner, UC Davis Canvas, Final Grade Submission, myucdavis, and Office 365 were among the services affected. UC Davis services were re-established about 2:30 p.m. after technical personnel were able to restore a redundant network access channel.
 
The outage affected much more than UC Davis.

A recent change to UC Davis Canvas makes it easy for faculty to identify wait-listed students in class rosters.

Instructors can see the improvement when they look at the roster displayed in the People tool of their course sites. Beginning with classes taught in the upcoming winter quarter/spring semester, any students who are wait-listed will have “Student_Waitlist” after their names (see example).

Previously, students were listed simply as students, whether they were on a wait list or not.

UC Davis website managers and communicators should be interested in this news: The campus will retire Cascade as a content management system, and cPanel as a place to host websites, in late 2018.

The change comes as more campus units opt to build and manage sites with SiteFarm, a more modern UC Davis web publishing platform, instead of Cascade. SiteFarm is a central service available at no cost to campus units, and includes website hosting.

UC Davis will host the next annual University of California Computing Services Conference on Aug. 13-15, 2018. The theme this year is “sustainable technology.”   

The conference is open to any faculty and staff who work in IT or are interested in information technology. Presentations are generally designed for IT professionals, but some sessions will cover topics that also apply outside IT, such as project management, service delivery and procurement.

The University of California has ordered all UC campuses and locations not to buy or deploy Kaspersky Lab products, including technology that uses embedded Kaspersky code.

Kaspersky’s main product is antivirus software. Based on procurement records and data from managed computer systems, only a handful of locations at UC Davis use Kaspersky products, so the impact here is minor.