IT Work to Take Place Over Spring Break
IT Services will perform maintenance and implement changes in the computing environment between Saturday, March 21, and Saturday, March 28. Read on for dates and details.
IT Work to Take Place Over Spring Break
IT Services will perform maintenance and implement changes in the computing environment between Saturday, March 21, and Saturday, March 28. Read on for dates and details.
IT Services will perform maintenance and implement changes in the computing environment between Saturday, March 21, and Saturday, March 28. This week is traditionally a time when demands on systems are lower, reducing the risk that students, faculty, or staff will be inconvenienced by the outages and disruptions that this work may cause.
Please bookmark MiamiOH.edu/ITstatus 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.
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:
March 23 to May 29: Virtual machine migration
IT Services will begin migrating infrastructure in our virtual machine environment (VMware). We are moving VMs from ClusterP to a newer environment, ClusterQ. This will involve installing and configuring new hardware in the data center.
No service outage is expected, but as with all substantial moves like this, please note that this work will take place over a longer period of time, because there is a large number of VMs to migrate. This migration will take place over two distinct periods:
- March 23 to May 6
- May 20 to May 29
Systems administrators will be on hand to troubleshoot throughout the migration, and we do not expect any issues to arise, as most if not all servers are redundant.
March 24: Central authentication system (login screen)
IT Services will perform a planned upgrade to the central authentication system (CAS) on Tuesday, March 24, starting at 7 a.m.
At this time, CAS will be transitioned from version 6.6 to version 7.3. This upgrade is required in order to support changes taking place to Duo Security (see the IT News article about how this affects individual users).
After the update, when you log in, you will see a new loading screen before and after the Duo prompt that states:
The Central Authentication Service is processing the request. This might take a few seconds. Please stand by and do not close your browser.
This change should be fully transparent and should not cause any issues.
March 26: Production Oracle Grid security patching
On Thursday, March 26, starting at 5 p.m., IT Services will be installing security patches to the production Oracle grid infrastructure (specifically on the databases that are on 19c).
These patches will typically be installed in a rolling fashion, one Oracle Grid node at a time. This means the supported databases will not be completely down, and services will be available since they all have multiple instances (except for IAPROD—see below). However, users may need to log back into their sessions after the upgrade (as some applications don’t handle failover well).
Note on IAPROD: This database only has one instance. Therefore, during the installation of the patch on this server, there will be a full outage. It will take around 20 minutes. Please be sure to save your work.
These patches are estimated to take about 60 to 90 minutes to install on each node. AppWorx will be disabled for the duration of the upgrade.
Our Oracle environment contains a significant amount of personally identifiable information about members of our community, and installing patches in a timely fashion helps us ensure that we are taking the appropriate steps to properly safeguard that information.
March 31: Duo Mobile update deadline
Due to new internet security activities affecting Duo Security, Miami’s multi-factor authentication partner, older versions of the Duo Mobile app will no longer send push notifications starting March 31, 2026.
Most Miami community members will not be impacted by this change, as their device is already up to date (version 4.85.0 or later). If you are impacted, you have been contacted directly by IT Services (and we will be sending reminders!). Hot tip: Take this time to set updates to “automatic” so things like this don’t impact you in the future.
For more information and links to guides on updating your mobile apps, please see our news article about the deadline.
March 31: Filelocker sunset
As we announced earlier this year, the file sharing service that Miami has used for a long time, Filelocker, is being retired at the end of March. The system is end-of-life, which means that the infrastructure where the service resides is no longer eligible to receive security updates or vendor support – meaning we should no longer be using it.
The replacement system, called SecureFileShare, is available for use now, and it can be found at: https://securefileshare.miamioh.edu/.
Our recommendation to you: begin using SecureFileShare now! Tell your friends and colleagues about it, and update any documentation you may be responsible for that mentions Filelocker.