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
ISG News has posted a new item, 'HIT Building: Electric Power Interruption on
Wednesday, 25th of July'
Due to maintenance work relating the electric power supply of the HIT building
there will be a planed interruption from 5:00am to 8:00am on Wednesday the 25th
of July.
Please note that the whole HIT building will be without electric power during
this time (The server room HIT D 13 is excepted from this interruption).
Shutdown your computer and switch off (use main switch if available or unplug)
your electrical devices in advance to avoid local data loss and help prevent
start-up peaks when electric power is switched back on.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/07/16/hit-building-electric-power-interr…
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
thomber
thomber(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, 'Login Server Downtime'
Apart from the file-, mail- and web servers exists another crucial element of
our core server infrastructure, namely the servers managing the account
information and logins (LDAP). With a current uptime of a remarkable 550 days,
it is time for an upgrade of the operating system and high-availability cluster
software. For this reason we schedule a downtime on Wednesday 18th July between
07:00 and 08:00.
Most services will be affected and unavailable during that time, as they require
an authentication with your D-Phys account (email, file server, print server,
managed workstations). Note that, even though you will not be able to check your
emails or send new ones, all incoming mails will be received and safely
delivered to your inbox afterwards.
If everything goes smoothly, the actual downtime should be considerably less
than the scheduled hour.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/07/13/login-server-downtime/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Claude Becker
becker(a)phys.ethz.ch
ISG News has posted a new item, 'Short Mail Server Downtime on Friday Late
Afternoon'
We have scheduled a downtime of the D-PHYS mail server for hardware maintenance
on Friday, 1st of June 2012, starting after 4pm and lasting approximately half
an hour. During the downtime sending and receiving mails will not be possible.
Incoming mails will be slightly delayed.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/05/31/short-mail-server-downtime/
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
ISG News has posted a new item, 'Mobile printing'
Until now it was not possible to print on D-PHYS printers while you're on the
road with mobile devices. Since several people expressed their interest in such
a possibility, we have created two methods that allow you to do just that: read
more.
As there's no common standard for mobile printing, certain restrictions apply.
If you find yourself with an email that you think should print but doesn't,
please let us know.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/05/07/mobile-printing/
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, 'The Art of Scaling'
Note: this is a purely anecdotal posting about our struggles with some
performance bottlenecks in the last few months. If you're not interested in such
background information, just skip.
You might have noticed that since about January 2012 using our file and mail
servers hasn't been as smooth as usual. This posting will give you some
background information concerning the challenges we encountered and why it took
so long to fix them. Let's begin with the file server.
Way back in the days (i.e. 5 years ago), when the total file server data volume
at D-PHYS was about 10 TB, we used individual file server to store this data.
When one server was full, we got a bigger one, copied all the data and life was
good for another year or two. Today, the file server data volume (home and group
shares) is above 150 TB and growing fast and this strategy doesn't work any
longer: individual servers don't scale and copying this amount of data alone
takes weeks. That's why in 2009 we started migrating the 'many individual
servers' setup to a SAN architecture in which the file servers are just huge
hard drives (iSCSI over Infiniband, for the technically inclined) connected to a
frontend server that manages space allocation and the file system. The same is
true for the backup infrastructure, where the data volume is even bigger.
This new setup had to be developed, tested and put in place as seamlessly and
unobtrusively as possible while ensuring data access at all times (apart from
single hour-long migrations). The SAN architecture was implemented for Astro in
December 2010 and has been running beautifully ever since. In 2011 we laid the
groundwork to adopt this system for the rest of D-PHYS's home and group shares
and after a long and thorough testing period the rollout happened on January 5,
2012. Unfortunately, that's when things got ugly.
At first, we noticed some exotic file access problems on 32bit workstations. It
took us some time to understand that the underlying issue was an incompatibility
with the new filesystem using 64-bit addresses for the data blocks. As a
consequence we had to replace the filesystem of the home shares. Independently
we ran into serious I/O issues with the installed operating system, so we had to
upgrade the kernel of the frontend server and move the home directories onto a
dedicated server. In parallel, we had to incorporate some huge chunks of group
data while always making sure that nightly backups were available. All this
necessitated a few more migrations until we finally achieved a stable system on
March 28.
The upshot: what we had hoped to be a fast and easy migration turned out to
cause a lot of problems and take much longer than anticipated, but now we have a
stable and solid setup that will scale up to hundreds or even thousands of TB of
data.
See live volume management and usage graphs for our file servers.
As for the mail server, matters are to some extent related and partly just
coincidental in time. The IMAP server does need access to the home directories
and hence also suffered when their performance was impaired. But even after
having solved the file server issues, we still saw single load peaks on the IMAP
server that prevented our users from working with their email. Again, we put a
lot of time and effort into finding the reason. As of April 13, we're back to
good performance and arrive at the following set of conclusions:
Particular issues:
a covertly faulty harddisk in the mail server RAID seems to have impaired
performance
CPU load of the individual virtual machines on the mail server was not
distributed across the available CPU cores in an optimal way
General mail server load:
while incoming mail volume doesn't increase much, outgoing mails have grown 50%
in the last year alone
more and more sophisticated spam requires more thorough virus and spam scanning,
increasing the load on the mail server
our users have amassed 1.1 TB of mail storage (up from 400 GB in January 2010),
which need to be accessed and organized
Bottom line:
We'd like to thank you for your patience during the last 4 months and apologize
for any inconvenience you might have had to endure. In all likelihood the
systems will be a lot more stable in the future, but of course we're constantly
working to ensure the D-PHYS IT infrastructure is able to keep up with the fast
growing demand of disk space (the data volume has tripled in the last year
alone). We've learned a lot and we'll put it to good use.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2012/04/19/the-art-of-scaling/
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