On Monday, March 25, ISG will be on an all-day field trip to CERN. No mails, tickets or phone calls will be answered on that day. We'll catch up with your requests on Tuesday.

Last night the regular daily software update on the managed Ubuntu workstations removed the network-manager package. This left most of the workstations unusable. We are working to restore the network connectivity.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

This post might help to clarify some questions related to the warranty conditions of new hardware. It is the result of internal inquiries we performed in reply to customer requests. Skip if you're not interested.

Switzerland, like other European countries, knows two forms of liability a vendor has to/can offer to clients of its hardware products: Gewährleistung and Garantie.

• Gewährleistung is mandated by law and covers basic liability if a piece of hardware fails. In Switzerland, Gewährleistung was just extended from 12 to 24 months on Jan 1st, 2013. This means that for the first two years, any defect whose cause was already present at the time of purchase has to be covered by the vendor. As you can probably guess, the part in italic can be the crucial one.
• Garantie is a voluntary service offered by most, but not all vendors. Its conditions can be pretty freely chosen by the vendor, unlike Gewährleistung where the terms are given by law. Garantie can cover a wider range of defects and it can also be a service you have to pay for.

Now how does this matter to you? Let's take a current real life example: you'd like to buy a new Apple MacBook Pro 13". Right now, you have a number of interesting options:

• Neptun: CHF 1305.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 3 years of Apple Garantie (price of Apple Care included)
• Dataquest: CHF 1240.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 2 years of Dataquest Garantie. Additionally, you can pay CHF 99.- for a third year of Dataquest Garantie.
• Apple EDU Store: CHF 1268.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 1 year of Apple Garantie. Additionally, you can pay CHF 210.- for another 2 years of Apple Garantie. IDES offers the same to ETH employees for CHF 195.-

It's hard to tell if the conditions of the additional Garantie are really more accommodating than those of the mandatory Gewährleistung. Wear parts like the battery for example are typically covered by neither. Harddisks on the other hand (most common failing part in a laptop) should be covered by both. In the end the best option will also depend on your usage pattern and the expected life time of your device. Regardless of the type of warranty you have, you should always report any problem you'd like to get fixed as soon as possible.

Sources:
Apple warranty conditions
Computer World article

Apparently this time they mean it:

On Thursday, February 14, ETH facility services will conduct extensive power network tests in the HPT building, where ISG (and hence the helpdesk) is located. Power will be gone for ~ 2 hours starting around 13:30. During this time we will not be able to answer the helpdesk phone or work on your tickets. We'll post an update when power is back.

Update, 10:30h: We're already offline since in other floors of the building power has already been cut and caused a network outage on other floors.

For the last 4.5 years, our customers could choose from two webmail solutions: Roundcube and TWIG. With the introduction of Roundcube we announced the eventual removal of the old TWIG service which hasn't been updated in years and poses a serious risk in terms of security and spam distribution. Now the time has come to finally turn it off. All remaining TWIG users: please switch to Roundcube, TWIG will be disabled tomorrow, February 5, 2013.

Update: The upgrade to FM12 is completed.

Usually Filemaker upgrades are pretty seamless as newer clients can deal with older server versions. This time however the Filemaker company decided to implement major changes into their FM12 upgrade that require a new database format. This means that FM12 server can't talk to FM11 clients and vice versa. Hence we have to upgrade both server and client in one go.
This migration will take place on

Monday, February 11, starting at 17:00.

This upgrade will affect you if you either:
a) use remote databases from fm.phys.ethz.ch,
b) use one of our managed workstations on which the client will be upgraded, or
c) both.

Actually, case c) will be the easiest as after the migration things should just work again on FM12. In case of a) you'll have to make sure that you upgrade your local FM11 client before you can continue using our remote databases (see this howto). For b): if you're on a managed workstation, you'll find the new FM12 client on Tuesday morning. If you're working with local databases (not from fm.phys.ethz.ch), you'll have to upgrade those databases to the FM12 format. FM12 will do this for you automatically when you open FM11 databases for the first time.
The server migration itself will probably take one hour during which time the remote databases on fm.phys.ethz.ch will NOT be available. The clients will be installed during the night Monday -> Tuesday. If you need access on your managed workstation on Monday evening after ~18:00, please let us know so that we can upgrade the client on your machine earlier.

Tomorrow,

Tuesday, January 29, starting at 07:15 am

there will be a short downtime of our LDAP server since we have to perform some maintenance work. You will not be able to log in or use our file services during this downtime. The expected duration is < 15 min however, so most of you won't even notice.

We are very pleased to introduce Anastassios Martakos!

In the mid of January he started as a trainee in our group and is going to slide over to a regular apprenticeship as an IT Systems Engineer in the ISG D-PHYS. He is currently picking up basic Unix skills and helps us to pull up a demo setup for a cloud based storage solution. In his spare time he already gained IT experiences in programming impressive 3D games.

Welcome to our group Anastassios! We wish you an interesting time in our field of work!

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.

This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We've been hard at work to further improve and extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2012:

• Integration of IGP's IT into ours: as you might recall, our coworker Thomas is actually paid by D-BAUG's IGP institute in exchange for us providing our IT services to their users. For the last 12 months, we have migrated their servers, data, users and software into our setup so that in future we can all profit from a unified solution
• File servers and backup: after some difficulties earlier this year our file server and backup infrastructure is now rock solid and ready for the fast growth in data volume that we expect in the next years. All disk backends have been intregrated into our SAN setup and are connected via either Infiniband or 10G ethernet for maximum speed. Just yesterday we passed the 1 PB mark in file server disk space. Yes, that's 1024 TB.
• Mail server bottleneck: also in spring, the sporadic performance bottleneck on our mail server could be found and fixed. The server is now running on full steam again
• Personal user groups: probably completely unnoticed by our customers, all user D-PHYS accounts have been migrated to personal user groups this year. While this has been the standard behavior on modern Unix systems for many years now, our LDAP directory dates back to SunOS which combined all user accounts into one ''staff'' group. Not a big deal for you, but makes life much easier for us.
• Group share reporting: in order to provide a better overview of space allocation and usage on our group shares, we introduced a periodic report email containing the link to an interactive usage graph.
• Mac OS X 10.7: the Mac workstations have been migrated to OS X 10.7, building a unified setup to facilitate software distribution
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: the Linux workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, a long-term support (LTS) version that benefits from an extended support cycle.

Apart from these highlights, of course there have been numerous small projects and improvements to our setup, making both your and our life easier.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my whole team for their hard and dedicated work all year long.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2013!