It is my pleasure to welcome Christian Ringger into our group. He joins us to replace Thomas Berchtold in the Windows team.

Welcome Christian!

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 2014:

• eXile: in order to be able to keep Windows XP machines that cannot be upgraded connected to the network, we have created the exile system of dedicated virtual firewalls. Currently there are 57 computers safely hidden in this network.
• Security flaws: 2014 saw the disclosure of three rather severe and widespread security problems in quick succession: Heartbleed, Shellshock and Poodle. We patched all affected systems within hours of the announcements and also scanned the network for hosts that had been overlooked. If you're managing any networked machines (not just servers!) yourself, please make sure those are not vulnerable.
• Outages: we had a major incident on August 27 due to a failure of the server room cooling system. Fortunately we were able to repair the damage within hours. Other than that, our systems have been very stable in 2014 and we only had minor issues.
• Storage: in 2014 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 535 TiB to 685 TiB, further increasing the yearly growth rate. Another 120 TiB are already in the pipeline.
• Printing: in cooperation with Informatikdienste we prepared and introduced the new ETH printing system in D-PHYS. Several groups have migrated already, the rest of D-PHYS will follow in 2015.
• IPv6: during the last 12 months we prepared the D-PHYS network for dual stack (IPv4 + IPv6) operation. The biggest step towards a working IPv6 infrastructure was the deployment of an IPv6-ready DHCP server. Beginning next January we will incrementally hand out IPv6 addresses in the D-PHYS network. Later on, we'll make our services IPv6-ready.
• Brain drain: two ISG group members decided to take on new challenges this year. In November, Thomas Berchtold left us after 3 successful years to become the new Head of IT of D-BAUG, and Elmar Heeb, the founding father of ISG D-PHYS, will start his new job in Informatikdienste in February. We thank both Thomas and Elmar for their dedicated work and contribution to the team and hope to stay in regular contact with them in the future. Christian Ringger will replace Thomas in January, while Elmar's succession is still work in progress.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2015!

Together with our colleagues at Informatikdienste we have adopted the new ETH printing system in our department. Read about the many advantages of the project in our documentation. On October 15 we have migrated the first Institute (ITP) where people now can benefit from various features like pull printing and automatic toner supply.

So who's next to join us? We have printers in stock, so if your group is interested, we can accommodate you on very short notice. Just get in contact.

UPDATE Thu 09:30 - all systems should be back to normal. Please let us know if you still encounter problems. Thanks to Axel and Paddy for their commitment and the incredible Dalco service for fixing it within 6h (at 8am, mind you).

UPDATE Thu 00:50 - a broken valve blocked the cooling water in the HIT D 13 server room and all 14 water cooled racks severely overheated (not just D-PHYS). We managed to revive almost all services with the exception of the GGL file shares (this server is dead). We'll post updates later today when we have more information.

complete loss of cooling in the server room. We have yet to assess the damage.

Update Thursday 07:15 - all systems back to normal. whew.

Update Wednesday 11:00 - first rack back to normal. The picture shows how it looked during the remodeling.

Update Wednesday 07:00 - the most difficult part is over and the first rack is being retrofitted as we speak

All of D-PHYS's important servers (and services: mail, homes, SAN, web) reside in two water-cooled racks in HIT D 13. On Wednesday, August 20 those racks will have to be retrofitted by our colleagues of Informatikdienste since certain spare parts are no longer available. We have an elaborate plan how to externally power the servers while the racks are offline that schedules a 5-minute downtime that most of you won't even notice. However, there is a small chance that this external power supply does not work as expected which would lead to a longer interruption. Unfortunately we have no influence on the date, time and procedure of this modification and can only try our best to minimize potential consequences. So if something should go wrong next Wednesday, please don't panic, we'll be hard at work to fix it ASAP.
Thank you for your cooperation.

On Monday, May 5, there will be a scheduled power outage in the HPT building, between 13:00 and 22:00. This will also affect ISG's offices, but none of the servers. Our services will run as usual, but we'll have to move the helpdesk to a temporary location during the outage. So please be patient when calling and wait for your call to be redirected to our pager or write an email instead. We hope to be back to normal by Tuesday morning.

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 2013:

• New apprentice: As of August 14, Anastassios has started his apprenticeship with us and is already deeply involved in a complex PHP/Ajax/PostgreSQL project. Keep it up!
• Mailserver: This year saw a massive increase in spam and especially phishing attacks. They're getting more and more sophisticated and now include valid logos and even personal names. We were forced to tighten email policies and further fortify our mail server in order to battle those waves.
• Backup: For the data on our file servers we provide one month of nightly backups. Now our powerful backup system based on COW BTRFS snapshots allows us to extend this period to up to one year in exponential intervals for most file systems. Note that anything beyond 30 days is best-effort only and we might have to cut back again in single cases. A new web frontend shows the status of all backup runs.
• Windows server: Several Windows server installations have been moved to a new powerful virtualization server and the Active Directory setup has been improved.
• Printer portal: All information regarding our printers can now be found on one website. You might want to check there if you have issues with a particular printer or just to get an idea about printing volume.
• Portal for managed workstations: Our new Chic! frontend shows the software status of our managed Windows and Mac workstations and allows you to request additional software packages. This service will be officially announced in January 2014.
• GitLab: We run a GitLab instance to facilitate collaborative programming projects and sharing of code. Get in touch if you'd like to use it.
• System upgrades: 2013 brought another round of OS upgrades, also for our servers. We updated most servers silently and combined all critical systems into one migration on September 11 in order to minimize downtime for our users.
• Windows XP exile: As reported previously, Windows XP will be end-of-life in April 2014. Since there's still a substantial number of XP machines out there (most of which cannot be upgraded due to soft- or hardware constraints), we'll provide a locked-down exile network that will allow a limited and well-controlled survival of those machines under certain conditions. We'll post an announcement when the system is ready.
• IPv6: This year we laid the groundwork for the slow migration towards IPv6 connectivity in our networks. In particular, we got our monitoring system IPv6-ready and prepared a NFSv4 rollout. We'll keep you posted about our IPv6 progress.

Apart from these highlights, of course there have been numerous small projects and improvements to our setup, making both your and our life easier.
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 2014!

UPDATE Thu 12.09. 07:30 If you're trying to connect to a SMB share from an unmanaged Windows machine, you have to use "ad\USERNAME" instead of just "USERNAME" from now on.

UPDATE 21:15 apart from the IGP group shares (which will be back in a few hours) all systems are back to normal. Please let us know if you experience any problems.

In order to upgrade the operating system on several core infrastructure servers of the Department, we schedule a general maintenance downtime on

Wednesday September 11, starting at 17:00, lasting for several hours.

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.

Please make sure to save all open documents before 17:00 on that day.

Since we will also change the way file server mounts are authenticated, users who haven't updated their passwords in a very long time might not be able to mount their home directories or group shares after the migration. If you run into this problem on Thursday morning, please first change your password. If the issue persists, contact us.

We will post an update when things are back to normal.

In the wake of Prism and Tempora I guess this comes exactly at the right time:

In collaboration with our colleagues at Informatikdienste we are proud to open the beta test to a new ETH-wide cloud storage service: polybox.
If you've ever used dropbox et al., you've probably come to appreciate the convenience of seamlessly sharing data from one computer or even mobile device to another via a cloud storage service. Effortless though this might be, you always have to keep in mind that your data will live ''somewhere out there'' in the cloud, and as we've learned the hard way in the last few weeks, the audience looking at your data is often larger than we think.
With polybox, this is fundamentally different: your data never leaves ETH's servers unless you carry it away yourself. In contrast to basically all other cloud storage services out there, polybox is therefore suited for storing data you don't want everybody and their cousin to read.
The service is now open to beta testers and provides 5 GB of cloud storage to every ETH student and employee. You can access your data via web frontend or install the handy sync clients that come with it. Please note that the documentation still lists some open issues (last two links in German) in the beta version, so please be prepared to provide feedback if you encounter any errors.
Please also note that polybox uses your n.ethz account and not your physics account and hence has no relation to your data at D-PHYS.

On Monday, March 25, ISG will be on an all-day field trip to CERN. No mails, tickets or phone calls will be answered on that day. We'll catch up with your requests on Tuesday.