Patriotweb.gmu.edu unavailable

May 03, 2019 2:37 p.m.
Outage category: 
Applications
Location: 
Off campus users
Status: 
Closed
Resolved alert: 
04/27/2019 8:45 am

Friday evening after hours Network and Security Engineering received a request from IT Security Office to create a new rule. This rule was to block traffic over HTTP and HTTPS from non-GMU IP space to two hosts on the MESA-PT-02 security zone.

Initial symptoms: 

Off campus users were not able to reach the patriotweb.gmu.edu website.

Duration: 
04/26/2019 6:30 pm - 04/27/2019 8:45 am
Impact to Mason: 

For the duration of the outage only those people on campus or connected via VPN could access patriotweb.gmu.edu.

Affected Services: 
Patriot Web
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Cause: 

The engineer did this but made an error when creating the rule that so that it blocked HTTP and HTTPS to all hosts on the security zone from non-GMU IP spaces.

Resolution: 

Saturday morning this was brought to Network and Security Engineering’s attention. This was quickly discovered and the fix was put into place Saturday morning.

Prevention: 

Moving forward we are hoping to have better definition around our zones and more zone-to-zone rules so there will be much less, hopefully zero, changes that need to be done on the network firewall for specific hosts.

STATISTICS
Service Team: 
Network & Security Engineering