Seminary Computing Services

Neither Seminary Computing Services nor Earlham Computing Services will ever ask you to send your password via email.If you have sent your password in response to a message claiming to be from us (see some samples), then you should assume that you have been "phished", and you need to begin taking steps to protect not only your email and Moodle accounts, but also your electronic identity.

Since the recent server upgrade, we are using the latest version of Moodle (1.9). As always, there have been many behind-the-scenes fixes and performance enhancements, but there are also several new features worth mentioning.

Moodle should now be running much faster, thanks to a brand new server which went live today (for technical details, click "Read More"). You should notice a marked improvement in Moodle's response time. We were also able to enable some new Moodle features that were not workable on the older server, including "drag and drop" reordering of course resources and blocks. As always, if you have problems with Moodle, let us know!

An issue we've had several questions about recently is the "Mailbox is not available" error when attempting to send email to @earlham.edu or @bethanyseminary.edu accounts. The problem is almost invariably that the recipient's mailbox has exceeded their disk space "quota". If this is happening to your account, see our instructions on requesting a temporary quota increase. Instructors, if you receive this error while attempting to contact a student, please contact SCS so that we can assist you.

Here's the latest phishing scam directed at Earlham email users:

All seminary employees¹ and students are assigned space on our servers. There are two types of space: a web folder, where you can set up web pages or whole web sites, and a documents folder, where you can store back-ups of your class papers, projects, and other important documents.

As internet 'phishing' scams become increasingly sophisticated, we have begun to see a variety of email scams targeted at the Earlham community. These messages are otherwise similar to other scams, but specifically claim to be from Earlham (or often EARLHAM). Like all such scams, they attempt to convince victims to send back usernames, passwords, social security numbers, or other private information. None of them are legitimate; it cannot be repeated often enough that

So you're taking a class in Greek or Hebrew, but your keyboard doesn't have an α or a ש - how can you type these characters into Moodle? Happily, language support in web browsers (and computers in general) has come a long way thanks to Unicode, a method of consistently representing characters from (nearly) all modern human languages. All modern operating systems will allow you to use Unicode, so it's likely that you already have everything you need to get started!

Our enterprise automated backup system makes regular backups of all critical seminary data. We are in the process of moving all individual computers into this system, which offers several advantages over the previous system, including massively reduced login and logout times and a web interface to allow employees to trigger backups of their own compters.

If your computer has been converted to the new system, you can trigger a backup at any time with a few clicks, as follows: