ISG-news

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December 2017

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[ISG News] 2017 in review
by Christian Herzog 18 Dec '17

18 Dec '17

ISG News has posted a new item, '2017 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 2017: Account expiry: in early 2017 we finished assessing all ~7600 D-PHYS accounts and blocked the expired ones. We also tied all D-PHYS accounts to their nethz counterparts wherever possible. This allows us to make use of ETH's employment information from now on. While we were at it: New LDAP servers: Since implementing account expiration meant touching most aspects of our identity management infrastructure anyway, we decided to completely overhaul our LDAP user database. We reworked the LDAP schema (the original one dating back to the early 90s) and set up a 3-way replicating OpenLDAP cluster. Windows Server Cluster: Several mission critical Windows Server instances have been moved to a newly created Windows Cluster. This complements last year's Linux cluster. Storage: in 2017 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 1.3 PiB to 1.6 PiB, making this a very slow year as far as storage growth is concerned. Server room migration: in August we had to move most of D-PHYS's servers three rack rows down in the HIT D 13 server room. We now have a solid foundation for our servers for the next years. Outages: apart from the above-mentioned migration, some short-term network interruptions and the unfortunate file server issues of late our systems have been very stable in 2017. Web server upgrade: in January we upgraded the operating system on the D-PHYS web server. We also used the occasion to clean up a lot of legacy cruft. OS upgrades: 2017 brought new OS versions for almost every system: the Windows 10 rollout picked up steam, High Sierra arrived on the Macs and Ubuntu 16.04 on the remaining Linux workstations. eXile: we migrated the configuration management from Puppet to Ansible and then re-installed all eXile gateways in a fully automated way with the latest Debian release. UCC: we laid the technical groundwork and performed implementation tests for the upcoming UCC rollout which will replace the existing ETH telephony system with an all-IP based solution. IT security: we participate in and support the ETH-wide IT security initiative. 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 2018! You may view the latest post at https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2017/12/18/2017-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

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[ISG News] Group share woes
by Christian Herzog 08 Dec '17

08 Dec '17

ISG News has posted a new item, 'Group share woes' As some of you might have noticed, we've had some service quality issues with our group share server in the last few months. While not all interruptions are under our control (Informatikdienste lately have been very busy upgrading the ETH network, causing various network disruptions), we do have a problem with the group share server: it runs fine for weeks on end until it suddenly doesn't. To this day we have not been able to pinpoint the underlying problem, despite having changed a lot of parameters, both software and hardware. Our next step will be replacing the kernel on the disk backends and switch some hardware - for that we need a scheduled downtime on Monday, December 11, starting at 06:00 during which the group shares will be unavailable for about 90 minutes. This affects all D-PHYS and IGP shares except the Astro and newly migrated IPA ones. We will post an update when the system is back. We do apologize for the inconvenience these service issues might have caused you. Please bear with us while we're trying to locate and eliminate the root cause. We're monitoring the situation 24/7 and try to react as quickly as possible whenever a problem occurs. But wait! You can help! There seems to be a correlation between crash probability and large scale small file I/O. This means you should, whenever possible, avoid reading or writing a lot of small files and bundle your data into fewer and larger files. This also increases performance! You may view the latest post at https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2017/12/08/group-share-woes/ 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

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