Yesterday's outage could be traced to a flaky voltage controller on one of our RAID adapters. We schedule a short maintenance downtime on

Sunday, Feb 12, around 13:00

in order to replace the faulty controller. Most services will be affected.

Update 14:57 Cleanup took a bit longer than expected, but now all system are back again.

Severe hardware failure on one of our core infrastructure servers. We're working on it.

Update 11:44 The hardware problem could be fixed and all services are recovering now. Sorry for the downtime.

In order to solve our recent file server problems, we schedule another migration on

Wednesday, January 25, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

During this time, you will not have access to your home or group directories, and also email will only work intermittently. Please stop all running jobs and log out prior to the migration.

Update 20:30 Migration completed. Every test we could think of passed. Please let us know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for your patience.

On Jan 5, after weeks of thorough planning and rigorous testing, we performed a migration of the home directories and group shares to our new SAN system. Soon afterwards, the first phone calls started coming in. The initial problem was very exotic and affected very few people (that's why we had no chance to detect it during the testing period), but the action we took to address it unfortunately caused a cascade of consecutive faults that led to the instabilities you had to endure for one week now and for which we are truly sorry. We now know how to fix the underlying problem, but we cannot operate on the running server. That's why we have to schedule an

emergency file server migration on Sat, Jan 14, starting at 07:00 and lasting well into the afternoon probably.

During this time, you will not have access to your home or group directories, and also email will only work intermittently. Please stop all running jobs and log out before Saturday morning.

We apologize for the suboptimal performance since Jan 5. You have every right to expect better, but this caught us completely off guard. Thank you for your understanding.

Update, Sat 14:15: mounts and email are up and running again. The problem on 32bit machines still persists, but we have an idea how to fix it on Monday.

Update Fri 20.01: we (hence you) are still suffering from severe stability problems on the file server. We are very hard at work and now have a plan that we really really hope will solve the problems. There will be another migration sometime next week. We're truly sorry for the inconvenience you have to endure.

It is my pleasure to welcome Thomas Berchtold into our team. He joins us from isginf and will strengthen our Windows support. His employment marks the beginning of our collaboration with IGP of D-BAUG.

Welcome Thomas!

Today at 13:00 we had to reboot plompy, one of our LTSP terminal servers. We're sorry for any inconvenience. In order to prevent those terminal servers from clogging up memory in the future, we hereby announce the following maintenance reboot schedule:

plompy: first Sunday of each month, 02:00 am
plimpy: third Sunday of each month, 02:00 am

There will always be one functioning terminal server and upon login your thin client will choose the right one. Please don't forget to save your data when leaving for the weekend before those two Sunday dates (that's always a good idea anyways).

After 3 years in our current offices in HPT D floor we will move to our new (and hopefully final) location in HPT H. Tuesday to Thursday this week our services will be somewhat limited, but the helpdesk will be staffed at all times.

We're looking forward to welcoming you in our new quarters!

On Monday, July 4, starting at 0700 we will upgrade our eGroupware installation to version 11.1. One of the most exciting features is the new ActiveSync plugin (incl. email push) that will also allow Android phones to sync calendar and contacts. We'll update our documentation as soon as 11.1 is running.

Update Monday 0930: the new version is installed and Android sync works. Read about it here.

ISG sits on a pile of older hardware that for various reasons cannot be used in our setup any more but that many people have expressed interest in. Following standard procedure we have first offered it for ETH internal deployment, and whatever is left can now be purchased for private use. These are mainly pre-Intel Macs and Shuttle barebones. In order to ensure complete fairness and not to privilege anyone, the following rules apply to everybody who's interested in buying:

General rules

• this goes to all D-PHYS members
• 1 item per person
• there's no warranty or service whatsoever. All devices have successfully been turned on, but that's it
• if your item doesn't turn on, you can bring it back within 5 days and get a full refund - but only then. No refund if you don't like it
• no OS, no software, no manual, no keyboard, no cables. You get one piece of hardware. All HDs are blank
• computers are CHF 100.-, monitors are 50.- - these are not our prices, but http://www.rechtssammlung.ethz.ch/pdf/220_Inventarwesen_Jan06.pdf
• all proceeds go to the D-PHYS funds, not ISG
• if you have no use for a computer without OS or software, don't come shopping

Registration

• first-register-first-serve basis
• register at https://isg.phys.ethz.ch/isgsale/ - you will get a number that determines your place in the queue
• registration closes Mon, July 11, 2011, the sale itself will be on Fri, July 15, 2011
• on July 11, 2011 we will publish the schedule on https://isg.phys.ethz.ch/isgsale/ - find your number and come to HPT D 1.2 at the time indicated. Don't come earlier, you'll just have to wait
• bring cash. The right amount - we don't have change

The sale itself

• 5 people at a time will be able to pick from what's left
• 1 item per person - NO EXCEPTIONS
• pay cash, no change
• take your item with you and have fun
• if your item doesn't turn on, get a refund within 5 days

Now that the dust has settled a bit, we would like to give a status update after the print server migration. Somewhat contrary to popular belief, the overall situation with printing has improved quite a lot. Most combinations of operating systems, client programs, file formats and printers work very well, with two notable exceptions:

• Mac OS X 10.6.7: printing some PDFs from non-Adobe programs on some printers fails. We're working on a solution. Either use Adobe Reader/Acrobat or print on any other printer. This problem is introduced with the 10.6.7 update. You'll have to use the Acroread workaround until we find a solution.  SOLVED: Apple released an official patch to fix the problems with fonts. Please update your computer.
• Macs: the LPD way of printing (readme) currently does not work. Again, we're working on it. Use CUPS in the meantime. SOLVED

As a reminder, please let us know immediately if apart from the above-mentioned cases you still experience printing issues.