TL;DR: we now offer a password manager service that also allows sharing passwords within groups.

Full story:
For a long time, we've been trying to promote IT security in general and secure password handling in particular. In both our introductory course and our documentation we recommend using a password manager to securely handle the plethora of passwords that modern-day life usually entails (hopefully a different one for each service!). What we did not have however was an easy-to-use solution to sync your password vault across your different devices. Yes, there's KeePassXC that can work with Polybox to ensure coherent password databases on all devices, but that's not exactly straightforward to set up.
In order to make setting up and handling the password manager easier for you, we're now announcing a new service: an Open Source password vault hosted at ISG D-PHYS:
Vaultwarden is an alternative implementation of the the Bitwarden backend and we've been evaluating it for a while. It now seems ready for prime time so after testing within ISG, we're releasing it to the Department. Aside from easier daily usage, it offers another feature that many (research) groups might find interesting: passwords and confidential information in general can be shared with others, e.g. the group's credit card with all PhD students.
If you'd like to give it a try, please read our service description to get started.

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. Unfortunately, two of our colleagues had to take extended sick leaves this year, so we didn't have as much capacity for innovation and had to focus on system maintenance.

Some highlights of 2023:

• Storage: in the first half of 2023, we performed a major overhaul on our storage and backup infrastructure in both hardware and software. The disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 4.8 PiB to 5.1 PiB.
• Infrastructure work: our Ansible deployment setup was further extended and refined. All Windows servers have been added as well as the macOS clients.
  All eGroupware users were migrated to the new SOGo calendar. We also enabled DKIM signing on our D-PHYS mailserver. The Windows HyperV cluster has been upgraded for better performance.
• Matrix/Element: We upgraded both the OS and the Matrix server software. This year we counted 748 active users on 2579 devices (1019 Windows, 517 Linux, 424 Mac, 619 Mobile), who sent 1'086'537 messages in 5'510 rooms created on our server. Our users also participated in 763 other rooms with 1'157'466 messages.
• ISG lecture series: our Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists lecture series was held twice in 2023 with shockingly low attendance.
• Outages: apart from some short-term network interruptions, our systems were pretty stable in 2023.
• OS upgrades: work is well underway to migrate the managed Linux workstations from Ubuntu to Debian and the majority of servers are now running Debian bookworm. The Windows team started the Windows 11 rollout. Most of the managed Macs were upgraded to macOS Ventura.
• Software upgrades: mostly incremental upgrades in our Windows and Linux software list this year.
• IT security: with the world being what it is, IT security plays an ever increasing role in our work and permeates all our plans and projects. We also take part in the current rewrite of ETH's IT security regulations. On the Windows virus scanner front, Sophos was EOL'd and replaced by Windows Defender.

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 2024!

Update 27.11.: We now have the migration dates and final printer list here

As you might have read elsewhere, ETH will consolidate its printer fleet for cost cutting reasons. Even though at D-PHYS we already have a very efficient printing landscape, ID will enforce a uniform 30% cut across the board. We have tried to limit the impact as much as possible and still ensure a fair and even printer distribution throughout D-PHYS, but the implications will be felt by everyone.

• 30% of all existing printers in D-PHYS will be dismantled.
• All remaining printers will be replaced with HP hardware.
• All those will get new generic queue names (like p-hil-hp002) that bear no indication as to the printer's location in the building.
• Everybody will have to reinstall all printers they'd like to use in the future.
  • on managed workstations we will prepare this as much as possible.
  • on self-managed machines you'll have to follow our instructions.
• This might be the perfect opportunity to switch over to the universal card-ethz queue that will let you forget about queue names (you can do that already now).
• We understand that for some of you this change will significantly affect your daily work. We urge you to PLEASE not try to solve the problem by buying your own printer. Instead, please get in touch with me (Christian Herzog) so that I can collect your complaints and forward them to the person responsible for this change.

The whole process is supposed to happen in December and will be rolled out building by building. We're posting this already now as individual printers in D-PHYS have already been replaced.

We will update this post with updates as they become available.

Scheduled maintenance will be taking place on our home.phys.ethz.ch file server on Wednesday, July 12, starting at 16:00. The service will be down for approximately 4 hours. We will be replacing the hardware with all-flash storage and upgrade the base system.

Update 18:15: the new home server is open for business. Most SMB + NFS clients will not have survived the 2h downtime and will have to be rebooted. We'll go through the most obvious ones, but if yours won't work, try restarting.

All home directories (Linux, Windows and Mac, SMB and NFS) will be unavailable during this time.

For emergency cases, you'll have read-only access to the backups as described here.

This migration will mark the end of the huge storage migration project of 2023. Thanks for your patience.

Scheduled maintenance will be taking place on our group-data.phys.ethz.ch server on Wednesday, June 7, starting at 16:00. The service will be down for approximately 4 hours. We will be replacing some hardware and upgrade the base system.

All group shares will be affected except IPA, IGP and Galaxy.

For emergency cases, you'll have read-only access to the backups as described here.

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. Since it took us almost exactly one year to fill our vacant Linux System Engineer position (once again: welcome Sascha!), we didn't have as much capacity for innovation as in previous years and had to focus more on system maintenance.

Some highlights of 2022:

• Mail server: the D-PHYS mail server got an OS upgrade in spring and was migrated to our general hypervisor setup, which adds redundancy and facilitates maintenance. In addition, work is in progress to support DKIM and further tighten our SPF and DMARC settings.
• Web server setup: the main D-PHYS web server got an OS upgrade in spring, test and staging environments and optional ssh access for power users.
• Infrastructure work: our Ansible deployment setup was further extended and refined and the first Windows servers have been added.
  Work has started to replace the Sophos virus scanner on managed Windows workstations.
  We migrated our floating licenses from three servers to a single high availability server.
  Within the next year, we'll migrate all eGroupware users to the new SOGo calendar.
• Storage: in 2022 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 3.7 PiB to 4.8 PiB, marking a significant annual growth in storage volume. A major storage migration is due in early 2023.
• Matrix/Element: This year we counted 737 active users, who sent 1'019'205 messages in 5'259 rooms that were created on our server. Our users also participated in 423 other rooms where 1'190'446 messages were sent. Two additional research groups migrated from Slack to Matrix.
• ISG lecture series: our Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists lecture series was held twice in 2022 with surprisingly low attendance.
• Outages: apart from some short-term network interruptions, our systems were pretty stable in 2022, with the notable exception of a localized "3 dead disks in a RAID6" disaster in September.
• OS upgrades: most managed Linux workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 and the majority of servers are now running Debian bullseye. The Windows team prepared a new LTSC release and a Windows 11 setup. The managed Macs were all upgraded to macOS Monterey.
• Software upgrades: mostly incremental upgrades in our Windows and Linux software list this year.
• IT security: with the world being what it is, IT security plays an ever increasing role in our work and permeates all our plans and projects. We also take part in the current rewrite of ETH's IT security regulations.

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 2023!

It is my pleasure to welcome Sascha Giger into our group. He joins us to complete the Linux team.

Welcome Sascha!

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 2021:

• Network migration: as first announced in 2018 and later detailed in July of this year, we had to completely restructure the D-PHYS network this fall. This reorganization was prompted by a segmentation of the router infrastructure at Hönggerberg and will render the network more redundant and resilient. Visible changes include a NAT network, new DHCP/DynDNS technology and the foundation for IPv6 in all network zones.
• Hypervisor setup: we run a lot of virtual machines at ISG and this spring we remodeled our hypervisor infrastructure to make it more flexible and capable. Hourly snapshots now give us the possibility to roll back if something goes wrong in a VM. It also allowed us to move our InfluxDB server to an SSD backed hypervisor, increasing performance and stability.
• Office 365 migration: the Microsoft Office suite was upgraded to M365 on all managed Windows workstations this year.
• Proprietary software woes: two major software companies caused us (and you!) a lot of headaches this year: on July 5, Microsoft broke Windows printing while trying to fix a security problem and it took them until the end of November to really repair it for everyone. Good job. Meanwhile, Adobe managed to break Acrobat logins for months on end and there's no general solution yet.
• Windows configuration synchronization: the technology used to sync your desktop settings between managed Windows workstations was migrated from 'roaming profiles' to UE-V this year for greater speed and better reliability.
• New lab PC backup solution: after we've had a good experience with our 2020 laptop backup system based on restic, we set up a similar system for lab PCs in 2021. We're currently migrating the last machines from the old BackupPC server.
• 2021 Hardware Crisis: you might have noticed that a lot of hardware components are only available at outrageous prices, lead times measured in months or just not at all. The situation is especially bad for graphics cards and storage components.
• ISG lecture series: reacting to a growing demand for IT-related knowledge in the department, we established the Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists lecture series that we'll repeat each semester.
• Matrix/Element: in 2021 we continued to extend the feature set of our popular chat & collaboration system. We contributed bug fixes and lots of time in bringing usable maths support into Element (our supported Matrix client) as this was our number one most wanted feature. The second most wanted was better support for managing groups, which was added this year with spaces. Behind the scenes we have been scaling out our homeserver to keep up with the demand and continue to be stable and responsive. This year we counted 702 active users, who sent 927'123 messages in 4'571 rooms that were created on our server. Our users also participated in 396 rooms that were not created on our server where 731'451 messages were sent.
• Storage: in 2021 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 3.2 PiB to 3.7 PiB, continuing the obvious trend of ever-growing data. In spring (just in time before the 2021 Hardware Crisis) we replaced the older disk backends in our SAN with fewer, bigger disks.
• Outages: apart from some short-term network interruptions, the only noteworthy service interruptions this year were two update-induced storage hiccups on June 10 and December 7.
• OS upgrades: most managed Linux workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and a first batch of servers are now running Debian bullseye.
• Software upgrades: mostly incremental upgrades in our Windows and Linux software list this year.

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 2022!

In August of 2010, we introduced our groupware solution for D-PHYS. In the last 11 years the system has served the Department well, but we believe now would be a good time to think about the future of groupware at D-PHYS. Here's an incomplete list of things we noticed over the years:

• the groupware system seems to get used almost exclusively as a calendar
• for distributed calendars, the world and people's expectations have changed
• file and sync formats have come and gone
• 17 people will have 634 completely orthogonal and incompatible use cases for calendars
• the product that won our evaluation round in 2010 is not necessarily the best system for 2021

We have sampled the market and test-installed several candidates, but since our humble ISG-internal calendar only covers one very specific use case, we strongly encourage you to give us your feedback so that the next D-PHYS calendar solution will suit you well. In particular, we're interested in learning

• are you using any other egroupware module(s) aside from the calendar? If you don't tell us about it now, a potential replacement may not have this functionality!
• what's your current calendar use case? Just a personal calendar? A group calendar? In which configuration?
• what's your desired calendar use case? This might be the most interesting thing to learn...
• which sync protocols/devices are you using?
• what other software/products/services have you been/are you using?

If you would like to help make sure the next evolution in distributed D-PHYS calendars is a success, please join our Matrix room and participate! Thanks a lot.

oh boy, what a year.

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 2020:

• Home office: on March 12, due to rapidly rising Covid-19 numbers, ISG was sent to work from home, along with most of the department. While we had somewhat anticipated this step and were prepared for it, the first two weeks were very busy because we had to assist a lot of people who weren't. In the end I believe we got everyone set up and we have been fully operational from home with only occasional individual visits to the office since then.
• Matrix/Element/Riot: one of the most pressing issues with everyone working from home was an efficient and versatile tool for team communication. We had started internal tests of our Matrix chat system in late 2019, but then intensified our efforts in February and were able to release the system for general D-PHYS availability in home office week (HOW) 2. During the course of 2020, we continually kept working on the system and added new exciting features.
  We also run a Jitsi instance for privacy-aware video conferencing.
• New laptop backup: our traditional BackupPC backup system for laptops and lab computers relies on each backup client to be reachable in the D-PHYS network, which obviously didn't work any longer in the home office regime. In HOW 17, we released a new backup system for laptops that works from any internet connection worldwide. Unfortunately, only very few of you have signed up for the service so far. Please make sure you have a backup of your laptop!
• Ansible deployment: more servers and finally also the managed Linux workstations have been added to our ansible configuration management, allowing for completely automated installation of our systems.
• Network migration: the extensive Hönggerberg network reorganization we reported two years ago hasn't seen much progress by Informatikdienste, but we have been working on our side to make the first steps. In early 2020 we migrated the dhcp.phys DNS service from our servers to ID's as a prerequisite for the eventual Gebäudezonen split.
• Storage: in 2020 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 2.7 PiB to 3.2 PiB, continuing the obvious trend of ever-growing data. We have now also started the process of phasing out the oldest disk backends in order to replace them with fewer, bigger disks.
• Software licenses: in the past 12 months, both Adobe and Microsoft decided to switch to a new license system in which each installation requires a license tied to a personal user account. In future, we can't create or extend your Adobe or Microsoft licenses for you, no matter how often you ask us to. You have to do it yourself, according to our instructions for Adobe and Microsoft (you might also want to think about switching to less oppressive software alternatives).
• Outages: apart from two pre-announced storage migration windows (one of which took a bit longer than expected), 4 h of mail server hardware issues and some short-term network interruptions, our systems have been very stable in 2020. We are aware of the fact that wifi is quite often an issue, and we're trying to convince Informatikdienste to take it seriously.
• OS upgrades: The Windows team was active migrating the Windows 2016 servers to 2019 while on the Linux side the first workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 and most servers are now running Debian buster.
• Software upgrades: mostly incremental upgrades in our Windows and Linux software list this year.
• UCC: in February, the old non-VoIP phones in HPT, HPF and HPK were replaced by shiny new ones, just a few weeks before we were all sent home...
• ISG staff changes: Patrick Schmid left us at the end of 2019 and was replaced by Maciej Bonin in February. Christian Schneider was replaced by Stephan Müller in September. And finally, Sukash Sugumaran superseded Janosch Bühler as our apprentice.

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 2021!