Lars Rohrbach

Both the campus firewall and our EECS firewall block commonly-vulnerable Microsoft ports from the outside world, but we are not blocking access to port 3389, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This leaves RDP open to brute force attacks, and is responsible for many EECS Windows account lockouts. It is considered poor security practice to expose RDP to the internet.

Beginning February 20, we will be blocking RDP connections from off-campus at the EECS border; RDP connections to devices on the IRIS networks from campus networks, including the campus VPN, will not be blocked. So, if you wish to make a Remote Desktop connection to a machine on the IRIS networks, then you should first establish a campus VPN connection.

An exception to the RDP block will be the department Windows Terminal Server, winterm.eecs — Remote Desktop connections to winterm.eecs will not be blocked, so no VPN connection is necessary. Software on winterm.eecs will help mitigate brute force attacks.

To summarize, as of February 20:
* VPN users will still have the same access to their remote desktops.
* Access to winterm.eecs will not change.
* Users who use RDP to other devices on our network from off-campus will need to use VPN first.

See also:
* The campus VPN service

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Monday, December 25 to Monday, January 1st, reopening on Tuesday, January 2, 2018.

All departmental computing servers will remain on and should be available during the break, but there will be no staff on site to provide any computing support or handle any requests. Automatic monitoring systems will alert staff to critical infrastructure problems, and any such problems will be dealt with on a best-effort basis.

The IRIS Helpdesk will close early at noon on Friday December 22, and will reopen on Tuesday January 2. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (510-642-7777) or emailed to help@eecs, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until January 2.

Requests for new IRIS accounts that are received after 5pm December 20 may not be processed until January 2, 2018.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (for details, see [the Instructional website](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/End-of-Semester)). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs email over the break. If you are unable to contact inst@eecs, you can leave a message at 510-643-6141. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 2.

We recommend that all desktop computers be shutdown during the Energy Curtailment Period. If your Windows computer needs to stay on during the break, we recommend that you check with your system administrator to ensure that Automatic Updates are enabled with the option “Automatically download the updates and install them on the schedule that I specify” with a daily update schedule.

Computing support staff will be monitoring their email when possible, so please use standard email addresses to report any urgent problems. As a reminder:

Instructional Computing Environment: inst@eecs
Research / Staff Computing Environment: help@eecs

Information regarding campus IT closures is available here:
https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/it-schedule-holidays-and-curtailment-2017

Happy Holidays!

Adobe is updating their enterprise licensing, and as a result, many systems with Acrobat or other Creative Cloud applications installed began reporting on December 1 that you must provide a new serial number. This affects Adobe software installs from our WINSWW and MacSWW.

Campus has provided a serializer tool that can be run on systems using recent versions of Adobe software, to update the Adobe serial number. If your system is prompting for an updated Adobe serial number, you may find the serializer tool on our WINSWW or MacSWW:

* WINSWW: \\\\\\proj30.eecs.berkeley.edu\WINSWW\public\Adobe\CC2018\AdobeSerialization-Windows-CC2018v1
* MacSWW: smb://proj20.eecs.berkeley.edu/MACSWW/Intel/Adobe/CC2018/AdobeSerialization-Mac-CC2018v1.pkg

The serialization tool is reported to work successfully on some previous versions of Creative Cloud applications, but you are welcome to install the CC2018 versions if there are problems with serialization. Please contact your sysadmin or help@eecs if you need further assistance.

Note that systems using Berkeley Desktop, or BigFix or Jasper, may already have received the serialization fix.

See also: https://software.berkeley.edu/news/license-expiration-warning-adobe-creative-cloud