Please bookmark MiamiOH.edu/ITStatus or follow us on Twitter (@MiamiUIT) for real-time notifications of any disruptions that may occur during these maintenance windows.

If you have any questions about any of this work, please contact IT Help at 513-529-7900 or MiamiOH.edu/ITChat. Once again, to view the full calendar of planned IT activities and the current status of major systems and services, please visit our dashboard at MiamiOH.edu/ITStatus.

Here are some of the activities that we will be doing in January:

Jan. 7-22: VMware Upgrade

On Thursday, Jan. 7, technicians began the upgrade of the production VMware cluster (Cluster P). The work will continue over the course of the next two weeks, ending on Friday, Jan. 22.

We expect that all virtual machines (VMs) will continue to run without interruption. However, we will be closely monitoring the status of the production cluster. If you experience a dramatic difference in performance when accessing Miami resources, please contact IT Help.

Jan 12: Notice: Adobe Flash Player to be removed from University machines

You may have heard or read that Adobe Flash reached End of Life on Dec. 31, 2020. This impacts Miami-managed computers as well as personal machines, so please read on for more information.

Beginning Jan. 12, Adobe itself will block Flash content from playing in the Flash Player application. All of the popular web browsers (e.g., Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera) will permanently remove Flash from their products this month.

If you have a managed Miami computer, don’t worry! You don’t have to do a thing -- IT Services will automatically be blocking the use of Flash on Internet Explorer and Edge and will be uninstalling it from managed computers on January 12 to coincide with the official date decided by Adobe.

The discontinuation of support from Adobe means that the program will no longer receive security updates. Therefore, we highly recommend that you uninstall the Adobe Flash Player from your personal computers, as well.

More information can be found on Adobe’s website.

Jan. 13: Data center power upgrade

This is one of several planned upgrades to the data center Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems located in Hoyt Hall. It will take place Jan. 13 beginning at 8 am.

During this work, there will be periods of time when there will be an interruption of power to the data center, however, it is expected that during these times access to Miami systems should continue. Please be advised that whenever power supplies are being worked on, there is always the possibility of a disruption of service.

Please see the complete schedule for more information.

Jan. 15: Authoritative DNS migrating to AWS

In an exciting piece of news for Miami’s cloud efforts, IT Services will be migrating our Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Route53 service. This is being done to replace aging hardware and bring us closer to infrastructure-as-code standards.

This means, at a high level, that Miami domains will now be managed through Route53. In practice, you will not notice this change.

The cutover has been scheduled to begin on Jan. 15, 2021. We do not expect any outages to occur.