ISG News has posted a new item, '2016 in review'
This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in
D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We’ve been hard at work to further improve and
extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2016:
New team member: Sven Mäder joined ISG this year to replace Axel in our Linux
server team.
Account expiry: you might have heard that D-PHYS decided to phase out old
accounts in the future. We spent the last year laying the technical groundwork
for a smooth and painless implementation of this policy change. One first
visible result is our new account portal.
Printing: in summer we integrated student printing into the pia printing system
which means that we now have a comprehensive printing solution for the whole
department. The D-PHYS print server will be shut down in early 2017.
Storage: in 2016 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 929 TiB
to 1.3 PiB, again increasing the yearly growth rate. We are now using 60-disk
toploader chassis to maximize storage space-per-volume.
Outages: we scheduled two maintenance windows, on April 14 and September 5, in
order to perform hardware and system upgrades. Together with a network upgrade
by Informatikdienste on September 15, these were the only noteworthy downtimes
in 2016.
Docking network: in fall 2016 we migrated most of the department's network
sockets to the 802.1x-enabled docking network. While there is little immediate
benefit for most of us, this is a prerequisite for future network projects like
the upcoming Unified Collaboration & Communication (UCC) project.
Wifi: in early 2016 we developed and installed a portable wifi probe that
eventually led to the discovery of one of the underlying problems causing ETH's
wifi woes. Since then, wifi has been much more stable.
OS upgrades: 2016 brought new OS versions for almost every system: the Windows
10 rollout picked up steam, Sierra arrived on the Macs and Ubuntu 16.04 on the
Linux workstations.
Cluster: we built and deployed a new high-availability cluster setup for our
virtual servers this year.
Core services: a lot of infrastructure work has happened in the background to
ensure smooth operation and seamless growth of our services in the future.
Examples are: new ActiveDirectory servers for our Windows users, migrating our
webserver certificates to Let's Encrypt, a facelift for most of our websites to
match the AEM design and an upgrade of our iPXE boot screen.
IT security: we participate in and support the ETH-wide IT security initiative
and also worked hard to make the mandated n.ethz password change as humane as
possible.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my whole team for their hard and
dedicated work all year long.
Happy Holidays and see you in 2017!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/12/16/2016-in-review/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Christian Herzog
daduke(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, 'short maintenance downtime of astrogate on
Monday, Dec 12, starting at 07:00'
We schedule a short (~30 min) maintenance downtime of astrogate on Monday, Dec
12, starting at 07:00 in order to replace a network card. During this time no
access to the astro SAN data will be possible.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/12/09/short-maintenance-downtime-of-astr…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Christian Herzog
daduke(a)phys.ethz.ch