ISG News has posted a new item, 'Computer support during christmas holidays'
The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Monday, 24th of December 2012
and Monday, 2nd of January 2013. During this time, we can only provide limited
support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:
Switch off printers
Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.
We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us
in our IRC channel.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/12/20/computer-support-during-christmas-…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Schmid Patrick
schmid(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, '2012 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 2012:
Integration of IGP's IT into ours: as you might recall, our coworker Thomas is
actually paid by D-BAUG's IGP institute in exchange for us providing our IT
services to their users. For the last 12 months, we have migrated their servers,
data, users and software into our setup so that in future we can all profit from
a unified solution
File servers and backup: after some difficulties earlier this year our file
server and backup infrastructure is now rock solid and ready for the fast growth
in data volume that we expect in the next years. All disk backends have been
intregrated into our SAN setup and are connected via either Infiniband or 10G
ethernet for maximum speed. Just yesterday we passed the 1 PB mark in file
server disk space. Yes, that's 1024 TB.
Mail server bottleneck: also in spring, the sporadic performance bottleneck on
our mail server could be found and fixed. The server is now running on full
steam again
Personal user groups: probably completely unnoticed by our customers, all user
D-PHYS accounts have been migrated to personal user groups this year. While this
has been the standard behavior on modern Unix systems for many years now, our
LDAP directory dates back to SunOS which combined all user accounts into one
''staff'' group. Not a big deal for you, but makes life much easier for us.
Group share reporting: in order to provide a better overview of space allocation
and usage on our group shares, we introduced a periodic report email containing
the link to an interactive usage graph.
Mac OS X 10.7: the Mac workstations have been migrated to OS X 10.7, building a
unified setup to facilitate software distribution
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: the Linux workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, a
long-term support (LTS) version that benefits from an extended support cycle.
Apart from these highlights, of course there have been numerous small projects
and improvements to our setup, making both your and our life easier.
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 2013!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/12/19/2012-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, 'ISG Helpdesk Service Interruption'
On Thursday, December 20, ETH facility services will conduct extensive power
network tests in the HPT building, where ISG (and hence the helpdesk) is
located. We were told to expect at least one power cut lasting at least 15 min,
possibly longer. During this time we will not be able to answer the helpdesk
phone or work on your tickets. We'll post an update when power is back.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/12/17/isg-helpdesk-service-interruption/
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, 'Workshop: IT at D-PHYS'
When you first start your career at our department, the IT situation might look
a bit confusing: there's ID and there's ISG, two different accounts and e-mail
addresses, where to store the data... We figured that instead of fixing things
after they have gone wrong just because people didn't know how to handle them,
it would be easier for everybody to try and introduce new arrivals to D-PHYS' IT
as early as possible. That's why we hereby start our series of introductory IT
workshops. The first one will take place on
Thursday, November 29, at 14:00 in HPF G 6
So if you feel you have some questions regarding the IT landscape at D-PHYS,
please consider attending this ~ 1h workshop. Before you do, please take a look
at the website where you can also find the PDF of the talk. Maybe all your
questions are already answered in there. If not, head over to the registration
website and provide your name and e-mail address. In order to allow for a lively
discussion, we have limited the registration to the first 25 applicants. If
you're too late, don't despair, there will be enough tutorials for everyone,
we'll just schedule more.
Looking forward to seeing many of you in G 6!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/11/22/workshop-it-at-d-phys/
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, 'Power outage Monday evening + cleanup'
On Monday evening (19.11.2011) around 18:30 a power outage in the HIT server
room shut down most of our core infrastructure servers. Apparently the building
automation system had turned off the cooling in HIT D 13 and when the
temperature in the server room reached 37C, there was an emergency power cut.
After the electricians had restored power around 21:00, we started bringing our
servers back up. Around 23:00 most of the services were back, with the exception
of the main web server which we managed to recover on Tuesday around 9:00. Also
webmail took a bit longer.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/11/20/power-outage-monday-evening-cleanu…
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, 'Group drive usage reports'
Most of you use at least one of our group drives. Up to now, there wasn't much
control over the disk space usage of those group drives, apart from a global
quota for each share. We have now developed a monthly report than can be sent to
a designated administrator of a share and that nicely states total disk usage,
the biggest directories and a member list. It also contains a link to an
interactive usage chart (see example here) that can be used to explore the
directory. A demo report can be seen here.
So if you think you'd be a good candidate to receive the monthly report of your
share(s) and would like to get a good idea about the share's usage, please
contact us.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/10/04/group-drive-usage-reports/
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, 'Sophos Antivirus False Positives
'Shh/Updater-B''
Sophos Anti-Virus may tell you that a virus named 'Shh/Updater-B' has been
detected on your Windows computer. Please ignore this alert messages! Sophos
accidentially sent out a bad virus defintion database last night which causes
the virus scanner to detect the above mentioned virus in several legitimate
programs on your system. We take action to update Sophos with a fresh and
functional database. Thanks for your patience.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/09/19/sophos-antivirus-false-positives-s…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Thomas Berchtold
thomber(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, 'Maintenance downtime for group share
fileserver'
In order to upgrade the operating system and the server hardware, we schedule a
maintenance downtime on
Wednesday, 12. September 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.
During this time, you will not have access to the group directories.
We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might
cause.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/09/05/maintenance-downtime-for-group-sha…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Schmid Patrick
schmid(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, 'Upgrade of Roundcube webmail'
For some years now we have been providing you with the nice webmail solution of
the Roundcube project. Last night they released a new major version which we
will install
tomorrow Thursday, August 9, at 07:00.
Note that for about 30 minutes you won't have access to Roundcube. The new
version brings a very nice new theme (see screenshot) which we will be enable by
default. If for some reason you'd like to keep the old one, you can switch back
under Settings -> User Interface -> Interface skin.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/08/08/upgrade-of-roundcube-webmail/
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, 'New hardware for the laptop and lab PC backup
service'
We just replaced our ailing backup server for laptops and lab PCs inplace with
new, more performant hardware using the same proven BackupPC software, just a
newer version. Its web-interface is available under the same URL.
The new server will start making backups from scratch for every host. Backups on
the old server will still be available for a while at the address
https://backuppc-old.phys.ethz.ch/.
Our old backup server became a victim of its own success. In the end it handled
backups for over 100 hosts every day (over 160 during its whole life-time) and
stored about 10 Terabytes of backups.
The BackupPC server of the Institute for Astronomy is not affected.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/08/03/new-hardware-for-the-laptop-and-la…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Axel Beckert
beckert(a)phys.ethz.ch