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.

There will be an emergency maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server later today (Tuesday, 27th of December) due to unexpected hardware issues.

Update 16:30: Everything seems to work fine again. It's though likely that there will be another downtime for further maintenance in early 2012.

In order to gain more flexibility and performance, the home directories will move to our new SAN setup.

This will be done on Thursday, 5. January 2012, between 18:00 and 22:00.

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, Jan 10: We experience some unexpected and dubious problems with 32bit binaries (and therefore, 32bit machines). The symptoms range from not being able to log in (GNOME and KDE) to acroread and mathematica not starting. Workarounds while we're working on a solution: for failing logins, please call us. For acroread, use evince instead. For mathematica, log in to a 64bit machine, eg. login.phys, and start it remotely.

Update, 21:25: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)

The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Monday, 26th of December 2011 and Monday, 2nd of January 2012. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

• Switch off printers
• Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
• Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

Today, the 7th of December 2011, around 7pm, there will be a complete network interruption in the whole Department of Physics for about one hour. The central ETH IT Services (“Informatikdienste”) will replace the hardware of the core router to the HPx network zone (includes the HIT building).

Wireless LAN should not be affected, but as the servers will be offline, too, you won't have access to files or mails on the servers, i.e. don't expect to be able to work during the network downtime. The technicians will reconnect the servers first, so access to the servers from the outside of the Department or via WLAN will be restored earlier than 8pm. Workstations and printers will get network access back afterwards.

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).

On Wednesday, 5th of October 2011, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on several 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.

Update, 21:55: Upgrade of the incoming and IMAP/webmail/mailing list servers were successful. Everything is back to normal.

As some of you may have noticed there are a lot of viruses these days that arrive by e-mail and that slip through the virus filters. The current pattern involves ZIP attachments that contain executable code (EXE) inside it. The mail pretends to come from DHL, UPS, FedEx, or Xerox. We expect other fake senders like airline or hotel reservation systems to follow. We also expect to see infected PDF or MS office attachments.

The current viruses appear long before their signatures make it into the lists of the major anti-virus (AV) software. By the time the signature appears in the official lists the virus wave is usually already over. Be aware that no AV software can protect you reliably form viruses. All the AV software can do is keep the old known viruses at bay.

We are currently working hard to find such viruses and we keep our internal list of unofficial signatures. Once we recognize a new virus we clean them out of the user inboxes and move them to the SpamBox. However, we cannot garantee that we find all viruses.

Please be vigilant and do not trust attachments. ZIP and EXE are almost always bad. PDF are often OK but sometimes bad. Mail senders can be faked so make sure that you really expect an attachment from the sender.

We updated the hardware of 5 computers in the student computer room HPV F 7.1. With 4 GB of RAM and 3.0 Ghz processor from AMD they now have much more performance than the older ones. For identification, we have marked them with a blue label. These computers are available for public use within the usage policy while they're not being used for exercises.

This Thursday, the 7th of July 2011, around 7am, there will be a short network interruption in the whole Department of Physics. The central ETH IT Services ("Informatikdienste") will move our network zone to new hardware, necessary for some future services.

Additionally, the WLAN Landing Page of the "public" network will have a maintenance downtime from 7am to 8am.