System Maintenance – Sunday, September 20 – 8 am to noon

Computer Services will be performing routine system maintenance on Sunday, September 20 between 8:00 am and 12:00 noon.

During this time, ALL systems may be down. This includes and is not limited to:

• college web site
• Blackboard
• faculty/staff email
• Library
• Banner / Banner Self Service

If you gain access to any of these systems before noon, you may be cut off without warning.

STUDENTS: Plan ahead! Download / print / organize your study materials before Sunday morning. We’re very aware that there are a number of students who need to accomplish work during this time. There are a lot of things you can do without access to Genesee systems! We’re only shutting down our little corner of the world, not the entire internet!

If you have questions, do ask! I’m willing to listen:  mjheider@genesee.edu

PS: For planning purposes, the remaining maintenance days for the Fall semester are Monday, October 12 and Saturday, November 28. Those will be all day outages, from 7 am to 5 pm.

Sharing Computers; Safe Computing Habits You Need

I’m breaking out the browser icons, to point out that there are considerations you need to make if you’re sharing a personal computer at your home with other GCC students. (Or, really, sharing with anyone!)

I’ve made the recommendation before that you really need more than one browser on your computer. That’s for the situation where something doesn’t work, the first thing you need to do is try it in the ‘other’ browser.

If, however, you are sharing a computer with anyone else who also takes classes at Genesee? Those multiple browsers are mandatory.

What happens — and we all do it — is that you let the computer store your password as well as remember settings in cookies. Well, that gets confusing when more than one person is using the same computer. The cookies are really the killer; it remembers when you went into Banner Self Service or even your courses and it looks like you’re looking at the other person’s stuff.

This is your problem because you asked the computer to remember things.

To get around this, you must do a couple of things; doing all of these is better but you need to do at least one:

• at the very least, work in separate browsers; one of you use Internet Explorer and the other use Firefox — and do it religiously!
• install Firefox, Chrome and Safari on your computer; everyone has their own and uses that
• an even better option is to have separate logins to your home computer; when you’re done working and the other person wants to work, you log out and the other person logs into their separate account
• delete history, cache and cookies regularly — at least weekly if not daily; don’t let the computer remember any passwords
  • yes, this is painful; it’s what will keep everything secure

On campus, it’s not a problem because we make you log into the computer individually; and the system is set up to not remember you. That security is there for a reason.

At home? You’re the security person. You need to think about what you’re sharing!