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
ISG News has posted a new item, 'new ISG staff member'
It is my pleasure to welcome Sven Mäder into our group. He joins us to replace
Axel Beckert in the Linux team.
Welcome Sven!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/11/01/new-isg-staff-member-5/
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, 'Network upgrade at D-PHYS'
In collaboration with our colleagues in Informatikdienste we will use the
upcoming months to upgrade the D-PHYS network in order to make it ready for the
future. In particular, we will enable the IEEE 802.1x protocol in our network
that will allow us to virtually patch any VLAN to each individual client. This
will also pave the way for the upcoming VoIP telephony deployment in D-PHYS. The
migration will be a step-by-step process and we will visit each building and
floor individually to address potential questions during the migration. The
typical desktop or laptop computer will not notice the change except for a short
interruption of < 1 min. Certain macOS clients will need a bit of persuasion
however, the required steps are described here.
Things will look a bit different for new clients that connect to the D-PHYS
network for the first time only after the migration: they will not display the
well-known ISG D-PHYS landing page, but an OS popup or a generic ETH page. This
works the same way as the ETH wifi. You either supply your n.ethz credentials in
the popup or you log in via the landing page. Your machine will then be patched
into the ETH docking network. If you have a specific reason to have your machine
in the D-PHYS network (HPx::745 for the technically inclined), please let us
know and we will register your MAC address in our database - just like you did
in the past. All existing machines at D-PHYS have been preregistered for
HPx::745 in order to avoid any confusion.
So please be ready when Alex shows up in your group and announces the migration
date.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/09/23/network-upgrade-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, 'Network downtime 15th of September 05:30 -
07:30'
The Informatikdienste are upgrading the routers in our HIT/D/13 server room
causing a downtime of the network of about 1 hour on Thursday morning, 15th
September, between 05:30 and 07:30. Please note that various services will not
be available during that time.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/09/13/network-downtime-15th-of-september…
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, 'Maintenance window on Monday, September 5,
17:00'
In order to perform some core service upgrades, we schedule a server maintenance
window on
Monday, September 5, starting at 17:00 and lasting for approximately 3 hours.
Most D-PHYS IT services will be affected by that downtime, including logins,
file servers and e-mail services.
E-mails coming in during the downtime will be held on the sender’s side and
will arrive at D-PHYS with a delay. Sending e-mails won’t be possible during
the window.
We’ll update this posting as soon as things are back to normal.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/08/30/maintenance-window-on-monday-septe…
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, 'Groupware upgrade'
On Thursday, July 21, starting at 0700 we will upgrade our groupware solution.
The update is expected to take approximately one hour. As this upgrade will be a
major one (version 14.3 to 16.1), you might notice a few changes. In
particular:
if you didn't log out before we start the upgrade, your browser might be in an
inconsistent state and the new version might refuse to work. Just log out
manually in this case.
if you're using the ActiveSync/eSync/Exchange protocol for calendar
synchronization, you will have to recreate your sync account on your (mobile)
device. Just delete your existing account on the device (your groupware data
will still be on our server) and add it again (see documentation). We're sorry
for the inconvenience, but the synchronization code was rewritten to be faster
and more stable and is not compatible to existing accounts. We have tried to
identify all current ActiveSync users and will inform them via email.
the web interface will get a new look (see screenshot)
We have thoroughly tested the new version internally. If you find any problems
after the upgrade, please get in touch. Thanks.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/07/14/groupware-upgrade/
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, 'Scheduled Maintenance Downtime Starting on
Thursday, 14th of April, 5pm'
Due to required changes to our network infrastructure and some hardware
maintenance, we're scheduling a maintenance downtime for most D-PHYS servers
starting on Thursday, 14th of April 2016, at 5pm. The downtime will last several
hours and single services may be down for longer than others or will be down
multiple times in a row.
We'll update this posting as soon as things are back to normal.
Most D-PHYS services will be affected by that downtime, especially file servers
and e-mail services, but also some virtual machines and most websites hosted by
ISG D-PHYS are affected. (http://www.phys.ethz.ch/ and other AEM-hosted websites
are not affected.)
E-mails coming in during the downtime will be held on the sender's side and will
arrive at D-PHYS with a delay. Sending e-mails won't be possible during the
downtime either.
After the migration we will benefit from a faster and more reliable network
connection to our servers.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2016/04/07/scheduled-maintenance-downtime-sta…
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, '2015 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 2015:
new team members: both Christian Ringger and Christian Schneider joined ISG
this year and have already made significant contributions to our setup.
new D-PHYS website: the department website moved from the self-hosted Zope
system into the ETH-wide AEM/CQ5 content management system. While the hard work
of migrating all the content was done by Andreas Trabesinger, we had to sort out
a lot of technical details to ensure a smooth transition and to keep D-PHYS's
various web services operational.
Printing: the majority of the department's printers have been migrated to the
new pia printing system. We are now waiting for Informatikdienste to support
student printing in order to complete the project.
Storage: in 2015 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 685 TiB
to 929 TiB, further increasing the yearly growth rate. We are also preparing to
keep an off-site disaster recovery copy of D-PHYS data on tape.
Outages: apart from a hardware failure of our mail server on December 2nd and a
short interruption on July 2nd our system have been very stable this year.
System upgrades: 2015 brought OS upgrades for almost every system: Debian Jessie
on many servers, OS X 10.11 for the Macs, Ubuntu 14.04 on the Linux workstations
and the first pilot installations of our new Windows 10 setup.
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: more IPv6 work, 802.1x / NAC in our network, a new network zone in
the server rooms, an upgrade of our iPXE boot screen and enhanced monitoring.
IT security: we participate in and support the ETH-wide IT security initiative.
Happy Holidays and see you in 2016!
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2015/12/17/2015-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, 'Results of IT services survey'
Thank you to all of you who participated in our IT services survey in late
October. More than one third of you completed the questionnaire and the feedback
has been extremely positive. The Department Head and ISG have evaluated the
results and would like to say thanks to everybody involved.
We have received many helpful comments that deserve an answer. Since the survey
was anonymous, we have no way of getting back to each responder individually, so
we compiled the questions, answers and comments on a nifty website that we
invite you to visit:
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/it-survey/
You can browse the results, read the comments and click on the little speech
bubbles to read our answers. There are a couple of topics that are sufficiently
common and generic that we would like to address them here:
* WiFi: yes we know it's not great, but we cannot immediately fix it as it is a
service of Informatikdienste. We are working together with our colleagues of ID
to resolve the problems and improve WiFi service on the campus.
* many of the wishes and problems raised in your comments actually have already
been solved by us. Also,
* there seems to be a positive correlation between how often people contact us
and their satisfaction with out services. So:
Please talk to us! We can only help you if you tell us about your problem, and
we hate unsolved problems. So we're going to try hard to fix them.
Thanks for you attention and we're looking forward to serving you in the
future.
You may view the latest post at
https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2015/12/14/results-of-it-services-survey/
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