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.

Due to a test relating the electric power supply of the HIT building there will be a planed interruption from 6:30am to 9:30am on Monday the 15th of July.

Please note that the whole HIT building will be without electric power during this time (The server room HIT D 13 is excluded from this interruption). Shutdown your computer and switch off (use main switch if available or unplug) your electrical devices in advance to avoid local data loss and help prevent start-up peaks when electric power is switched back on.

Historically the D-PHYS print server has been accessible under the host name printer.ethz.ch. As it turns out, this name violates ID's DNS rules and they have requested we change it. We therefore have modified all references pointing to printer.ethz.ch to now address printer.phys.ethz.ch. We have incorporated some technical solutions that redirect many connections automatically, and also our managed workstations have been migrated, but there might be individual configurations that need manual intervention. So if printing stops working after Wednesday evening, you might have to change the print server address -- see our printing documentation.
(more…)

We will perform a maintenance reboot of several infrastructure servers on Thursday, 16th of May 2013, starting around 5pm. This will cause a downtime of all e-mail related services (receiving + sending mail, accessing webmail and non-cached mails) as well as the license server for IDL, the control server for Condor grid computing, and most hosted virtual machines.

We expect the downtimes to be short and sequential.

Update 17:50: Everything went fine, we're back to normal.

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.

Apparently this time they mean it:

On Thursday, February 14, ETH facility services will conduct extensive power network tests in the HPT building, where ISG (and hence the helpdesk) is located. Power will be gone for ~ 2 hours starting around 13:30. During this time we will not be able to answer the helpdesk phone or work on your tickets. We'll post an update when power is back.

Update, 10:30h: We're already offline since in other floors of the building power has already been cut and caused a network outage on other floors.

For the last 4.5 years, our customers could choose from two webmail solutions: Roundcube and TWIG. With the introduction of Roundcube we announced the eventual removal of the old TWIG service which hasn't been updated in years and poses a serious risk in terms of security and spam distribution. Now the time has come to finally turn it off. All remaining TWIG users: please switch to Roundcube, TWIG will be disabled tomorrow, February 5, 2013.

Update: The upgrade to FM12 is completed.

Usually Filemaker upgrades are pretty seamless as newer clients can deal with older server versions. This time however the Filemaker company decided to implement major changes into their FM12 upgrade that require a new database format. This means that FM12 server can't talk to FM11 clients and vice versa. Hence we have to upgrade both server and client in one go.
This migration will take place on

Monday, February 11, starting at 17:00.

This upgrade will affect you if you either:
a) use remote databases from fm.phys.ethz.ch,
b) use one of our managed workstations on which the client will be upgraded, or
c) both.

Actually, case c) will be the easiest as after the migration things should just work again on FM12. In case of a) you'll have to make sure that you upgrade your local FM11 client before you can continue using our remote databases (see this howto). For b): if you're on a managed workstation, you'll find the new FM12 client on Tuesday morning. If you're working with local databases (not from fm.phys.ethz.ch), you'll have to upgrade those databases to the FM12 format. FM12 will do this for you automatically when you open FM11 databases for the first time.
The server migration itself will probably take one hour during which time the remote databases on fm.phys.ethz.ch will NOT be available. The clients will be installed during the night Monday -> Tuesday. If you need access on your managed workstation on Monday evening after ~18:00, please let us know so that we can upgrade the client on your machine earlier.

Tomorrow,

Tuesday, January 29, starting at 07:15 am

there will be a short downtime of our LDAP server since we have to perform some maintenance work. You will not be able to log in or use our file services during this downtime. The expected duration is < 15 min however, so most of you won't even notice.

We are very pleased to introduce Anastassios Martakos!

In the mid of January he started as a trainee in our group and is going to slide over to a regular apprenticeship as an IT Systems Engineer in the ISG D-PHYS. He is currently picking up basic Unix skills and helps us to pull up a demo setup for a cloud based storage solution. In his spare time he already gained IT experiences in programming impressive 3D games.

Welcome to our group Anastassios! We wish you an interesting time in our field of work!