Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for April, 2009.
There are 5 critical, 2 important and 1 moderate updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

There will be a short maintenance downtime of our authentication server this evening at 7pm. This means that you won't be able to log in to any managed D-PHYS workstation or D-PHYS service for about 5 minutes. Update 19:01: Maintenance successfully over.
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On Wednesday, April 8, starting around 0730 we will upgrade the RAM in plimpy, our LTSP terminal server. This will cause a downtime of about 5 min and the loss of all open sessions. Please make sure to have all your data saved by Tue evening if you're working on a thin client.

Update Wed 0800: plimpy now has 16 gigs.

For a long time we used so called wildcard SSL certificates for most of our web sites and services. Especially newer web browsers issued warnings about them. We recently exchanged the wildcard certificate on https://www.phys.ethz.ch/ and other websites to a new type of SSL certificate listing all websites hosted on that machine. Since today also our infrastructure servers (e.g. https://registration.phys.ethz.ch/), have such a new SSL certificate.

If you have installed our CA certificate as described in our article How to configure web browsers, the new certificates won't cause any more security warnings. If you have not installed our CA certificate in your web browser, a warning about a new unknown certificate will pop up for many of our SSL-enabled websites every time we add a new website. Because a new website means that we have to generate a new SSL certificate for the whole web server the new site is hosted on. We therefore recommend to install our CA certificate in your web browser to avoid those annoying warnings on D-PHYS websites.

All computers in the D-PHYS network have to be registered with their MAC address. This is an important measure to ensure the security and integrity of our network. In order to alleviate the inconvenience this might cause in some cases, we now allow expired machines to be reactivated not only by us, but also by their admins and deputies. To this end we have created the website

registration.phys.ethz.ch

which allows you to easily reactivate all expired machines you're registered as an admin or deputy for. We hope to save us all some time with this new service.

Tomorrow Tue March 17, starting from 0730, we will upgrade our Roundcube installation. Expected downtime: about 15 min.

Update Tue 0745: upgrade completed. Have fun.

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for March, 2009.
There are 1 critical and 2 important updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

The Informatikdienste of ETH will change their AFS policy by March 31 of this year. AFS functionality will be provided through a dataless AFS cell at ETH.
If you still require an AFS account which is connected to storage you need to act now and arrange an agreement for your use or move your data to some other place. Please consider the following points:

1. data on the ETH AFS server: This service will only be available under a contract with the Informatikdienste as a paid service. We recommend moving your data away from AFS if possible. NAS services (SMB/CIFS, NFS) are available from the Informatikdienste or the Department of Physics. Please ask the ISG D-PHYS if you need help or advice.
2. an AFS identity as user coming from the ETH: If you own data on other AFS servers around the world that are tied to your AFS identity from ETH you may want to keep your ETH AFS identity or transfer ownership to some other AFS identity. This service will be provided by Informatikdienste as a general service free of charge but only upon request. If you need this please let us (isg@phys.ethz.ch and tilo.steiger@id.ethz.ch) know.
3. access of AFS servers as an anonymous user: This service will continue for the foreseeable future without further action required from your side at this time.

Without a reaction from your side we assume that you don't need an AFS account anymore and you will become an anonymous user to AFS.

Note: you can use an AFS identity from another cell if you have one. You don't need an ETH AFS identity for that. E.g., to use your CERN AFS identity on the Linux workstations use klog -cell cern.ch

Further reading: Wer braucht noch AFS??? by Tilo Steiger at the ID-Blog

We need to move most of the group directories to a bigger fileserver.
This will be done on Thursday, 5. March, between 19:00 and 21:00.

During this time most some of the group directories (windata, macdata, unixdata) will be limited to read-only access, and the others will have a short interruption of availability.

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

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

Update 20:40: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)

We are service providers, and you are our customers. In order to be able to offer the best IT service possible, it is important for us to know what your needs and requirements are.

We therefore invite you to take this opportunity to tell us what we're good at, but especially what we still have to improve to best meet your IT needs. You can use the paper ballots outside of HPT D 19 or write an e-mail to isg@phys.ethz.ch, and you can participate either anonymously or provide your name if you want us to get back to you.

We explicitly invite our D-PHYS students to tell us your opinion! Do we offer what you need in your daily student life? Please let us know.

Thanks in advance for sharing your ISG experience with us. We'll pay heed to what you say!