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.

The new print server solved many of the problems that were troubling you (and us) in the past. Unfortunately, it seems it also introduced a couple of new ones. In order for us to be able to address them, it is very important that we know about them in the first place. We hadn't seen those issues in our months-long tests, otherwise we wouldn't have deployed the new server. So, pretty please with sugar on top, call us immediately if your print job does not come out as expected. A problem description like "it hasn't been working for weeks" does not help anyone. Please call us, we're working hard to find and eliminate those issues. Thank you.

We know printing is not always fun, and we hear your complaints. During the past few months we have been busy setting up a new print server that should solve most of today's problems (hopefully). We will deploy the new system on

Monday, April 4, at 07:30

The only change for you should be faster and more reliable printing. If you do experience any problems when printing, please let us know immediately so we can fix it.

Update 08:45 DNS confusion about old/new print server, we'll have to wait for the DNS cache to flush

Update April 5, 16:10 migration is done

Time for our biennial customer satisfaction poll!

We are service providers, and you are our customers. In order to be able to offer the best IT service possible, it is important for us to know what your needs and requirements are.

We therefore invite you to take this opportunity to tell us what we're good at, but especially what we still have to improve to best meet your IT needs. You can use the paper ballots outside of HPT D 19, write an e-mail to herzog@phys.ethz.ch, or use the form below to submit your feedback, and you can participate either anonymously or provide your name if you want us to get back to you.

We explicitly invite our D-PHYS students to tell us your opinion! Do we offer what you need in your daily student life? Please let us know.

We also plan to organize a visitation of our HIT server room. So if you'd like to see where your files and e-mails spend their days, please let us know too.

Thanks in advance for sharing your ISG experience with us. We'll pay heed to what you say!

It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Claude Becker in our team. He will replace Kati Zehnder as our Mac specialist as Kati decided to continue her career in the ETH Informatikdienste. We would like to thank Kati for her commitment in the last 3.5 years and are looking forward to a productive and inspiring collaboration with Claude.

If you have ever wondered what keeps the friendly people of ISG busy all day long, your wait is now over. In the upper right corner on our website you can now find a little box with some interesting numbers about the computing resources at D-PHYS. They are updated every night and right now look like this:

• 141 managed Linux workstations
• 102 managed Windows workstations
• 27 managed Mac workstations
• 65 thin clients
• 141 printers
• 62328 GB of used file space
• 82660 GB of used backup space
• 6946 GB of used laptop backup space
• 180 rejected mails per min
• 16 received mails per min
• 193 mailing lists
• 4716 LDAP accounts
• 134 group drives
• 88 virtual web hosts

We are happy to announce that our ticket system now allows you to track the status of your tickets at ISG D-PHYS.

We will continue to refrain from sending out ticket confirmation emails, but you can now log in to https://rt.phys.ethz.ch/rt in order to check progress on your requests.

If you are using your regular D-PHYS email address when emailing us, just type in your D-PHYS login to gain access. In case you opened your tickets from an external email account, use the Forgot Your Password feature on the login page to request a password for this email address.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems when using this service.

On Friday, September 17, at 22:00,  we will have to extraordinarily reboot our 64-bit Ubuntu workstations in order to deal with a nasty security issue. We're sorry for the short notice but we've been unpleasantly surprised by this just as much as you have. If you're reading this in time, please save all your data and log out if you can. Please note that also the terminal servers plimpy, plompy, plempy and plumpy (yes I know..) are affected. Thank you.

Today we are pleased to announce the D-PHYS eGroupware collaborative calendar solution http://groupware.phys.ethz.ch. We have put a lot of effort into the task of finding a groupware package that works with as many different clients as possible and offers the widest range of features. So if a synchronized calendar service could be interesting for you, give it a shot. Please also consult our readme detailing the different sync solutions.

If you're still using our much older https://webcal.phys.ethz.ch/, please move on to eGroupware as soon as possible. This service will eventually be discontinued.