The central IT services will gradually disable the older IPSec protocol for ETH VPN:

• 16th Nov 2023 for students (@student-net.ethz.ch realm)
• 13th Dec 2023 for employees (@staff-net.ethz.ch realm)

Those of you who are already using the Cisco Secure Client for their VPN connections will not be affected by this change. Also the Linux openconnect client will continue to work.

However, any client relying on the IPSec protocol will become non-functional. In particular, the built-in VPN of Apple operating systems (macOS, iOS, iPadOS) will stop working. All affected users must migrate to the Cisco Secure Client in the upcoming weeks, to avoid any disruption of the VPN service.

For the actual installation, please refer to the VPN documentation of Informatikdienste, or our own readme for macOS.

Also note that, in the upcoming months, ETH will enable Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA) for the VPN service. So all users will have to enter a one-time-password (OTP) when connecting the VPN. This is similar to the other services, mainly the cloud services of Microsoft, Adobe and Zoom, where MFA has already been enforced for ETH accounts. Further details regarding the VPN MFA migration will be announced as soon as the precise dates have been fixed.

Last year, the license agreement between ETH and Microsoft has changed. There are some new terms and conditions which are important if you use a Microsoft product from the ETH IT Shop.

If your hardware came with Windows preinstalled from the hardware vendor, you have your own license for MS Office, or you are using non-Microsoft products like Libre Office, then you are not affected by this new license agreement. No further action is needed in this case.

However, if you use any of the following software products from the ETH IT Shop you have to take action:

• Windows 10 Education
• Windows 10 LTSC
• MS Office XXXX (for example MS Office 2016)
• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Teams
• ETH Exchange Mail (mail.ethz.ch)

either on a managed Windows workstation from ISG or a self-managed workstation or notebook.

In this case you need to request access for a free Microsoft Cloud Subscription in the IT Shop. See here for instructions. If you already use MS 365 or MS Teams, maybe you already have the Cloud Subscription and no additional step is necessary. This can also be verified in the IT Shop. Remember that you need renew the subscription every year.

The new Microsoft license agreement allows only 1 MS Office XXXX (for example MS Office 2016 or Office 2019) installation per user. If you need installations on multiple computers for example in labs, use MS 365 instead.

Note that you will have to take action if you're affected. You cannot sit this one out. The Informatikdienste license team will be coerced by Microsoft to enforce license compliance, and they will contact you if you don't get your Cloud Subscription.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us in our Matrix chat #D-PHYS ISG Helpdesk or by email isg@phys.ethz.ch

Thank you for your attention, and kind regards.

Since our launch of Matrix at the D-PHYS in March a few things have changed.

Important changes

• The subdomain of the D-PHYS hosted Riot Element Web App changed and is now at element.phys.ethz.ch. If you still use the old subdomain riot.phys.ethz.ch, please move over to the new domain and verify your new session. We will start redirecting the domain in 2021. If you have no other way of getting access to your encryption keys, you could lose access to your encrypted messages
• New documentation is available at readme.phys.ethz.ch/chat

Other changes

• Federation with other Matrix instances at ETH and the rest of the Matrix network, giving us access to bridged networks like IRC, Slack, etc. as well
• We now auto-invite new users to two more ISG moderated rooms (News/Status). Opt-out by leaving if you do not wish to receive updates from us (discouraged!). All existing members of the D-PHYS Lobby have been joined last night
• End to end encryption support (enabled by default). Element Web does not provide a search function in encrypted rooms as that would be a security issue, use the Desktop App instead
• Secure key backup method has been set to show one option only ('Security Passphrase') to new users, which will still provide the secondary recovery method using a 'Security Key'
• We opened up public rooms and room aliases for everyone. Publish your room in the public room directory to be discoverable by others on the Matrix network
• We enabled quota of 2 GiB (initial) quota per user for media (uploads) to protect from accidental or abusive over-usage
• Bots for gitlab, reminders, RSS feeds and more
• Bridges for webhooks and Slack
• Integrations (widgets)
• Import of the Slack workspace history of 3 groups at the D-PHYS
• An Element Web instance with experimental (Labs) features like tags
• A tag manager to organize many rooms in large accounts
• Jitsi video conferencing and screen sharing solution (still experimental but used by ISG on a daily basis)
• URL redirecting service to invite people via websites or email

Lookout

• We will focus on improving performance and less on features
• Stabilizing 1:1 calls and video (TURN server) and Jitsi (group calls)

For help and discussion about Matrix and Element join #matrix:phys.ethz.ch

We will upgrade our FileMaker server next Tuesday 3rd September 2019 between 20:00 and 22:00 o'clock. This will lead to a downtime of the services that depend on a FileMaker database, for instance experimente.phys.ethz.ch and lager.phys.ethz.ch.

The new FileMaker server will only work with FileMaker clients version 16 or newer. If you need to access a FileMaker database from your computer, we recommend you install the latest FileMaker 18 from the IT Shop. If you have a ISG-managed computer, we will take care of upgrading the FileMaker client.

UPDATE 13:30 - Groupdata is back online
UPDATE 02:25 - Astrogate and Windata are back online, except groupdata
UPDATE 22:20 - Home server is back online and email working again

In order to upgrade the operating system on serveral servers, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Sunday, 4th January 2015, starting at 22:00.

Schedule:

During the downtime you can access readonly backups of your data of the night before, take a look at our readme.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Wednesday, 24th of December 2014 and Sunday, 4th of January 2015. 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.

The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Tuesday, 24th of December 2013 and Friday, 3rd of January 2014. 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.

The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Monday, 24th of December 2012 and Monday, 2nd of January 2013. 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.

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.