We will upgrade our LTSP server "plimpy" the next Wednesday, 24 June 2009 starting at 7 pm. Please save all your open documents and log out until that time. The machine should be ready again the next morning. You don't have to back up your data on /scratch since we will do that. Find the details on the software changes here.

While performing the upgrade to Debian "lenny" we will switch to a 64 bit kernel since finally also Adobe flash player, the last missing mission-critical app, is now available for 64 bit Linux. Unfortunately Adobe still doesn't ship 64 bit Linux versions of Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader). You can still fill Adobe Reader PDF forms and even create and edit PDF documents on the Windows RDP Server "ramora" which you can access via the ETH Zurich menu, Microsoft Office (or the full-screen login, see above link).

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.

Some weeks back we announced Windows logins on our Linux thin clients. If you're on one of our regular Linux machines and still would like to use some Windows-only program from time to time, you can of course get the same functionality by running rdesktop directly.
Please read our wiki page to learn how this is done.

Since Netbackup can't handle backups of PCs with intermittent network access (e.g. laptops or seldomly used lab PCs) nor MacOS X 10.5 or Windows Vista, there is a rising demand for backup of computers. For D-PHYS-owned laptops, laptops holding a relevant amount of ETH D-PHYS data, and for D-PHYS lab PCs, we now offer a backup service specifically targeted at computers with intermittent network access. It uses the free backup system BackupPC which does not need a local backup client to be installed on the computers to be backed up.

We ran the service in beta test for a couple of months and gathered a lot of experience with BackupPC. So we can now offer easy and regular backups of computers running any flavour of Linux and MacOS X, and---with the addition of locally installed 3rd party software (Cygwin)---also for Windows XP. Windows Vista as well as Windows XP without 3rd party software will follow. Read more about this service in our documentation wiki.