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.

On Monday, July 4, starting at 0700 we will upgrade our eGroupware installation to version 11.1. One of the most exciting features is the new ActiveSync plugin (incl. email push) that will also allow Android phones to sync calendar and contacts. We'll update our documentation as soon as 11.1 is running.

Update Monday 0930: the new version is installed and Android sync works. Read about it here.

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

On Wednesday, 15th of June 2011, starting at 3pm, we will upgrade the operating system of our webserver zwoelfi.ethz.ch. This implies a downtime of all websites and web-related services (including www.phys.ethz.ch, isg.phys.ethz.ch, lager.phys.ethz.ch, events.phys.ethz.ch, FIRST booking, all wikis and the groupware service) and most MySQL databases for several hours. As many of those websites have to be upgraded as well, they will successively come back online as we patch them up. We'll keep you posted as we proceed.

Update, 21:00: Basic web services are running again, some PHP based sites may still have smaller issues, Zope based sites may still have performance issues, too.

We developed a real-time monitoring of the number of pages printed in physics department. We keep track of the printed pages on each printer and the total for our two servers (cups and winprinter). The results are plotted on our printer homepage printer.ethz.ch. Clicking on the upper graph shows you more details, as well as the statistics over the last 30days. Moreover you can click on the little "Stats" icon next to each printer, to see its individual statistics.

These statistics not only help us to monitor and debug our printers, but should also make everyone aware of the large amount of pages printed in D-Phys, namely that more than 5000 pages are printed every single workday.

Please be eco-friendly and print only when you need to.