IT Services announces Winter Break maintenance windows
IT Services announces Winter Break maintenance windows
This year, as always, IT Services will be performing several upgrades and conducting routine maintenance on various systems to ensure they are ready for the return of students in January.
The last several weeks of the calendar year traditionally represent a time when demands on systems are lower, reducing the risk that students, faculty, or staff will be inconvenienced by the disruptions that this work may cause.
Please bookmark MiamiOH.edu/ITStatus or follow us on X (@MiamiUIT) for real-time notifications of any disruptions that may occur during these maintenance windows. Also: Please note that this list is not exhaustive and may change, so check back here regularly for updates as the winter term progresses.
If you have any questions about any of this work, please contact IT Help at 513-529-7900 or MiamiOH.edu/ITChat. 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 during this time:
Upgrade: Google SSO change
Some changes are coming our way for how Google does single sign-on, and the upgrade has been scheduled for Dec. 17, after grades have been submitted and before the university goes into a lull for the holidays.
The new SSO profile in Google will allow us to be more secure and flexible with how we architect our sign-in technologies. It will also help us future-proof our authentication schemas as we continue our IAM journey.
This change will take place on Dec. 17 at 10 a.m. and should be fully transparent (i.e., you shouldn’t notice anything new when you log in to your Miami Google account after the switch has been flipped).
However, please note: If you have previously turned on two-factor authentication in Google itself (NOT Duo -- this would be for Google 2-Step Verification) with your Miami email, this will increase the number of times you are prompted to authenticate with Google 2-Step Verification.
Planned maintenance: RapidIdentity cleanup and orphaned account removal
The IAM team (the Fates) will be taking the first of several steps toward cleaning up some of the technical debt that has accumulated in our account system over the years.
Currently, our account management tool, RapidIdentity, has some old/outdated historical data, and the team is looking at addressing this issue. The first step is to clean up some of the data in RI and remove some accounts (including “former” accounts) from OpenLDAP and Active Directory. Note that all of the impacted accounts no longer qualify for any identity services (i.e., no longer correspond to active members of the Miami community who need access to our systems).
This will include the removal of orphaned entries (approximately 300,000) that still exist in the system but are no longer actively managed by RI.
The team has made it such that only accounts with these three specific affiliation codes can be deleted:
- acc - Accepted applicants who never enrolled
- former accepted - Previously accepted but never enrolled
- frs - Former students or employees
Starting Wednesday, Dec. 17, the Fates will be starting the process of cleaning up this data. At this time, they will perform the changes needed to disable accounts in OpenLDAP and AD. The final deletion will occur on Monday, January 5, 2026, after Winter Break.
This change should be transparent, but as with any change that touches so many accounts, we want to hear if you experience any issues after the fact. Please contact IT Help if so.
