Changes to Secure Drew web sites
Over the next few weeks, Drew will be making changes to its web-based
services, such as Webfiles, FTPfiles, the ATTIC portal, etc. that will
affect the appearance of the login forms and may require you to make changes to the security certificate settings in your web browser in order to avoid certificate warning messages.
The new sign-on system is Novell iChain and will be replacing Drew's
home-grown Session Manager services. The move to iChain will enable us to integrate third-party web applications more easily, such as Blackboard and Ad-Astra. We have already been using iChain with
Webaccess on the new email server and Blackboard since the summer.
While not specifically related to iChain itself, your browser may begin
displaying security or certificate warning messages when accessing the new iChain sites. Due to changes in options available and pricing, Drew is no longer purchasing security certificates from third-party vendors for most of our secure sites. While this does have the advantage of reducing costs and giving us more flexibility, our self-signed certificates are not implicitly trusted by major browsers, unlike the commercial certificate providers which have struck agreements with browser manufactures to have their certificates included. As a result, your browser may produce a warning when accessing our sites. These warnings can be safely ignored. Allowing the browser to connect despite these warnings still means your connection is encrypted safely. If you'd like to prevent the warnings, you can simply add the Drew certificate authority to your browser's list of trusted CAs by following the instructions at:
http://depts.drew.edu/cns/remote/CA/
Please note that recent Drew standard desktop and notebook configurations will already have the Drew CA certificate installed, so you will not see warnings when accessing sites from one of these machines.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact the CNS
Helpdesk at x3205 or via email to helpdesk@drew.edu .
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