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