ISG News has posted a new item, '2018 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 2018:
New mail server: between January and March, the virtual machines that make up the D-PHYS mail server were migrated to new hardware. We're now running on a state-of-the-art server with SSD storage that will serve the department's needs for many years to come.
New LDAP servers: in late 2017 we started a big migration to a cluster of new LDAP servers. This move was completed in the spring of 2018 and the old server turned off.
group membership edit: one of the benefits of the LDAP migration is that group memberships can now be managed directly by dedicated owners of a group. If you feel responsible for one such group and would like to be able to perform member management yourself without having to go through us each time, please get in touch.
New web server: we purchased new D-PHYS web server hardware to replace the old 10-year-old system. Since we're also planning to change the setup of your web hosting, migrating the existing web sites to the new hardware will be a long process that will extend well into 2019.
Network migration: while we were in an advanced planning stage of a segmentation of the D-PHYS network and had already started to implement the first changes, Informatikdienste announced that the underlying network layout of the whole Hönggerberg campus would be redesigned in 2018/19 which deeply influences and impacts our work as well. We're now on hold until we know details of ID's technical implementation.
Storage: in 2018 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 1.6 PiB to 2.1 PiB, which means that growth in storage has picked up steam again after two slow years.
Outages: apart from the above-mentioned pre-announced migration windows and some short-term network interruptions, our systems have been very stable in 2018.
OS upgrades: the Windows 10 rollout has been largely completed and most Linux workstations have been upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04.
WiFi change: we accompanied and supported ETH's wifi change project in November.
UCC: the UCC rollout which will replace the existing ETH telephony system with an all-IP based solution has been put on hold by Informatikdienste since the service quality was severely lacking. We'll know more in 2019.Q2.
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 2019!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2018/12/18/2018-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, 'Storage migration'
In order to guarantee sustained performance and availability of our storage system, we need to schedule a few storage maintenance windows. The first one will take place on Wednesday, 12.12.2018 at 16:00 and affect all D-PHYS and IGP group shares, but not IPA or galaxy (technically: windata/macdata, but not astrogate or ipa-data). The relevant shares will be offline for at least 3 hours.
For emergency cases, there will be read-only access to last night's backup as described here.
Please note that these migrations will bring some overall changes to the D-PHYS storage setup:
the SMBv1 protocol will be disabled on all file servers. It has a long history of security issues and we've migrated all clients to newer versions, so this should not affect anyone. However, there's a small chance that we didn't catch all connections, so please contact us if you experience any issues after the migration.
all SMB protocol versions will be restricted to ETH-internal access. This step has been long overdue and since most ISPs block the necessary ports anyway, it shouldn't affect too many users. What it means however: in the future, file server access from outside ETH requires VPN.
IGP/D-BAUG will get their own front-end server igp-data. If you're with IGP and have already switched your file server mounts from windata to igp-data, you're good and don't have to do anything. If you haven't, you should do so before Dec 12 in order to get a seamless migration experience.
We'll update this post as the migration progresses and as soon as the systems are back.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2018/12/03/storage-migration/
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