As announced previously, about a year ago ISG was tasked by the department board to devise a workflow to expire D-PHYS accounts which so far had a life expectancy of ∞. In summer we started blocking accounts that were virtually unused, which almost by definition went very smoothly. Now we will start addressing accounts of users who are still using our services but do no longer have an affiliation with D-PHYS. They will receive an email informing them of a 1 month grace period before the account gets blocked. This posting is meant to serve as a reminder to everybody that this process is underway and questions may arise.
The project is explained in more detail in our readme.

On Thursday, January 19, starting at 08:00, we will OS upgrade the main D-PHYS web server. All websites hosted on zwoelfi*.ethz.ch will be down for several hours and will gradually come back as we progress. This does not affect the department website, the institutes and many of the group websites. However our groupware, the wikis and many special interest sites will be inaccessible. Note that if you're using the ActiveSync connector via groupware to sync email to your cell phone or Outlook, this won't work either. Temporarily use webmail while we bring back groupware as one of the first services.

Update 17:30 - due to an inordinate amount of user files on the web server the upgrade took a bit longer than anticipated. Now almost all websites should be back online, please let us know if you encounter any problems.

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!

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.

Sven Mäder

It is my pleasure to welcome Sven Mäder into our group. He joins us to replace Axel Beckert in the Linux team.

Welcome Sven!

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.

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.

Update Monday 18:30 We managed to complete the migration ahead of time, everything should be back to normal. If you still encounter any problems, please let us know.

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.

Update Thursday 08:00: Upgrade complete. Please let us know if you find any issues in the new version.

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!

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://isg.phys.ethz.ch/static/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 our 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.