For some years now we have been providing you with the nice webmail solution of the Roundcube project. Last night they released a new major version which we will install

tomorrow Thursday, August 9, at 07:00.

Note that for about 30 minutes you won't have access to Roundcube. The new version brings a very nice new theme (see screenshot) which we will be enable by default. If for some reason you'd like to keep the old one, you can switch back under Settings -> User Interface -> Interface skin.

Thu 07:15 Upgrade completed.

We just replaced our ailing backup server for laptops and lab PCs inplace with new, more performant hardware using the same proven BackupPC software, just a newer version. Its web-interface is available under the same URL.

The new server will start making backups from scratch for every host. Backups on the old server will still be available for a while at the address https://backuppc-old.phys.ethz.ch/.

Our old backup server became a victim of its own success. In the end it handled backups for over 100 hosts every day (over 160 during its whole life-time) and stored about 10 Terabytes of backups.

The BackupPC server of the Institute for Astronomy is not affected.

Due to maintenance work relating the electric power supply of the HIT building there will be a planed interruption from 5:00am to 8:00am on Wednesday the 25th of July.

Please note that the whole HIT building will be without electric power during this time (The server room HIT D 13 is excepted 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.

We have scheduled a downtime of the D-PHYS mail server for hardware maintenance on Friday, 1st of June 2012, starting after 4pm and lasting approximately half an hour. During the downtime sending and receiving mails will not be possible. Incoming mails will be slightly delayed.

Update 19:30h: Everything back again and looks fine. Performance may be slightly decreased for a day or so until the RAID has rebuilded.

Preparations took longer than expected, so we started later. The maintenance downtime itself also took longer due to some some unexpected issues which had to be resolved before we could continue start all service again. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Until now it was not possible to print on D-PHYS printers while you're on the road with mobile devices. Since several people expressed their interest in such a possibility, we have created two methods that allow you to do just that: read more.
As there's no common standard for mobile printing, certain restrictions apply. If you find yourself with an email that you think should print but doesn't, please let us know.

For some hardware and other maintenance we schedule a downtime of our mail server today (Fri, 13th of April 2012) evening after 6pm.

The downtime will likely take less than one hour. During the downtime you will neither be able to access your mails on the server nor to send mails via our server. Mails which are sent to the Dept. of Physics won't get lost, but will have some lag.

In order to restructure the filesystem of the home directories, we schedule a migration on

Wednesday, 28. March 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

During this time the home directories (winhome, machome, unixhome), the mail services and some websites will not be available.

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the home directories before the migration.

Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the home directories will still be accessible the same way as before after the migration is over, so you don't have to change anything.

Update 19:40 Migration completed. Every test we could think of passed. Please let us know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for your patience.

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.

On Thursday, 9th of Februar 2012, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on the remaining servers of our mail server cluster. This will result in temporary unavailability of most e-mail related services we provide: sending and receiving e-mails, mailing lists and webmail access.

Due to the maintenance e-mails may have some lag and arrive a few hours later than usual.

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.