On Monday, August 2nd, starting at 18:00, we need to modify our LDAP user database to incorporate structural changes needed for a new service we're currently setting up. This will cause a downtime of about 1 h, probably even shorter, that will affect user logins, email and file server access. We will post an update when things are back to normal. Update, 18:30: Things are now back to normal. 🙂

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

On Monday, August 2nd, starting at 07:00, our terminal server / computation nodes plempy, plompy and plumpy will be moved into the water-cooled racks in the HIT server room. This will cause a downtime of said machines of about 30 min. If your thin client connects to plompy or if you're performing calculations on plempy or plumpy, please make sure your data has been saved by Monday morning. After the move, the trio will enjoy the amenities of our most advanced server room that only another thunderstorm could disrupt.

Update Mon Aug 2 08:40 All servers have reached their final destination.

This morning around 03:00 a water ingress in our HIT server room shut down most of our essential infrastructure servers. As soon as power was back around 08:00 we started to bring our services online.
Please let us know if you still experience any problems. We apologize for the inconvenience. I guess water and servers just don't mix very well.

Status 12:14 apart from the BackupPC server everything should be working again.

Printing currently doesn't work on most Macs. We're still trying to find the source of the problem.

In order to relieve our Terminal Server plimpy of some of its computational burden, we assigned it a new sidekick specifically targeted at number crunching tasks: plumpy.ethz.ch

So if you've been using plimpy to perform calculations in the past, please ssh into plumpy from now on and do your work there. This should make both you and the plimpy users happy. Thank you.

Our terminal server plimpy (uptime: 80 days) is slowly clogging up with runaway processes, eating up memory and CPU. Since we cannot tell apart good processes from bad ones, we schedule a maintenance reboot for tomorrow, Wednesday February 24 at 18:00 in order to give the system a fresh start. We ask all users to save their data and log out of their thin clients. Update, 18:45: Plimpy is up and running again.

If you're on the road a lot, you might be familiar with our webhome service which provides universal access to your home directory. While this can be a life-saver in some cases, there are a few limitations: a) you only get access to your home directory, b) it's only viable for single-file operations. The protocol of choice for remote file access across public firewalled networks is WebDAV. We are now happy to announce a WebDAV gateway to our file servers.

Should you be interested in using this service, please read our documentation page.

Tomorrow Wednesday Dec 09, starting at 0730, we will upgrade our eGroupWare collaboration software (https://groupware.phys.ethz.ch/) to a new revision. The service will be down for about 30 min. The update addresses several known issues and should restore the SyncML functionality.

Tomorrow Tue Nov 3, starting from 0730 we will upgrade our eGroupware service to version EPL 9.1. Expected downtime: about one hour.

Today at 09:50 a crucial server died in our HIT server room. It took us about 20 min to move the affected services to other machines, during which time most of our machines weren't usable. We're sorry for the inconvenience. We're working hard to get rid of this fault-prone hardware.