Outages expected Nov. 20 due to firewall maintenance

Outages expected November 20 during Computing Center firewall migration

Submitted by krlu2891 on

On Monday, November 20, OIT will be migrating the Computing Center Data Center firewall to new hardware. This maintenance is a necessary step in upgrading end of life hardware, but is expected to cause outages for many of the campus’s online services.

While OIT has taken extensive steps to minimize the overall impact of this migration, service disruptions are expected to services dependent on the Computing Center firewall. In addition to hardware upgrades, our team will be updating outdated connections between applications, also known as setting firewall policies.

What to expect

During the maintenance window, starting at 5 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Monday, November 20, you may notice that various CU online services and applications are or become unavailable. This is due to a firewall policy dependency issue that was not accurately documented during our preparation for this move. Any dependency issues that arise will be investigated and resolved by the firewall migration team in OIT.

Some of the services dependent upon the Computing Center Firewall that may experience interruptions during the maintenance window include:

  • Enterprise Database (EDB)
  • Federated Identity Service/Shibboleth (fedauth.colorado.edu) and services that rely on it for authentication, including: 
    • Adobe
    • Buff Portal
    • Buff Portal Advising
    • Canvas
    • Classroom Capture
    • CS Moodle
    • CU’s Salesforce instance 
    • Digication
    • Docusign
    • LinkedIn Learning
    • MyCUInfo
    • Qualtrics (will not affect recipients ability to respond to surveys)
    • VoiceThread
    • WEPA Printing
    • Zoom
  • Servers managed by Systems Engineering 

Plan ahead and stay informed

  • Subscribe to OIT News and the OIT Weekly so you receive reminders and other important updates about technology at CU Boulder. 
  • Follow OIT on Twitter and Facebook to get updates on the outages as well as the all clear message after the maintenance is complete. 
  • If you have any questions about this outage or are concerned about how this may affect your department, please contact OIT at 303-735-4357 or oithelp@colorado.edu.