Update: Attendance of the workshop was somewhat lower than expected (3). We would still like to offer this workshop on a regular basis, but we'll have to see how many registrations we get. We'll keep the registration page open, but without a predefined date.

When you first start your career at our department, the IT situation might look a bit confusing: there's ID and there's ISG, two different accounts and e-mail addresses, where to store the data... We figured that instead of fixing things after they have gone wrong just because people didn't know how to handle them, it would be easier for everybody to try and introduce new arrivals to D-PHYS' IT as early as possible. That's why we hereby start our series of introductory IT workshops. The first one has taken place on Thursday, November 29, at 14:00 in HPF G 6.
So if you feel you have some questions regarding the IT landscape at D-PHYS, please consider attending this ~ 1h workshop. Before you do, please take a look at the website where you can also find the PDF of the talk. Maybe all your questions are already answered in there. If not, head over to the registration website and provide your name and e-mail address. In order to allow for a lively discussion, we have limited the registration to the first 25 applicants. If you're too late, don't despair, there will be enough tutorials for everyone, we'll just schedule more.

Looking forward to seeing many of you in G 6!

On Monday evening (19.11.2011) around 18:30 a power outage in the HIT server room shut down most of our core infrastructure servers. Apparently the building automation system had turned off the cooling in HIT D 13 and when the temperature in the server room reached 37C, there was an emergency power cut. After the electricians had restored power around 21:00, we started bringing our servers back up. Around 23:00 most of the services were back, with the exception of the main web server which we managed to recover on Tuesday around 9:00. Also webmail took a bit longer.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Most of you use at least one of our group drives. Up to now, there wasn't much control over the disk space usage of those group drives, apart from a global quota for each share. We have now developed a monthly report than can be sent to a designated administrator of a share and that nicely states total disk usage, the biggest directories and a member list. It also contains a link to an interactive usage chart (see example here) that can be used to explore the directory. A demo report can be seen here.
So if you think you'd be a good candidate to receive the monthly report of your share(s) and would like to get a good idea about the share's usage, please contact us.

Sophos Anti-Virus may tell you that a virus named 'Shh/Updater-B' has been detected on your Windows computer. Please ignore this alert messages! Sophos accidentially sent out a bad virus defintion database last night which causes the virus scanner to detect the above mentioned virus in several legitimate programs on your system. We take action to update Sophos with a fresh and functional database. Thanks for your patience.

Update 10:20 21-09.2012: Sophos aknowledged the problem and issued new definition update to solve the false postive detection problem. ISG D-PHYS managed Windows machines are no more affected by this iusse. If you still encounter problems on your self-managed Windows machines running Sophos refer to the following knowledge base article which may be a good entry point to find help:

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/knowledgebase/118311.aspx

In order to upgrade the operating system and the server hardware, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Wednesday, 12. September 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

During this time, you will not have access to the group directories.

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

For some years now we have been providing you with the nice webmail solution of the Roundcube project. Last night they released a new major version which we will install

tomorrow Thursday, August 9, at 07:00.

Note that for about 30 minutes you won't have access to Roundcube. The new version brings a very nice new theme (see screenshot) which we will be enable by default. If for some reason you'd like to keep the old one, you can switch back under Settings -> User Interface -> Interface skin.

Thu 07:15 Upgrade completed.

We just replaced our ailing backup server for laptops and lab PCs inplace with new, more performant hardware using the same proven BackupPC software, just a newer version. Its web-interface is available under the same URL.

The new server will start making backups from scratch for every host. Backups on the old server will still be available for a while at the address https://backuppc-old.phys.ethz.ch/.

Our old backup server became a victim of its own success. In the end it handled backups for over 100 hosts every day (over 160 during its whole life-time) and stored about 10 Terabytes of backups.

The BackupPC server of the Institute for Astronomy is not affected.

Due to maintenance work relating the electric power supply of the HIT building there will be a planed interruption from 5:00am to 8:00am on Wednesday the 25th of July.

Please note that the whole HIT building will be without electric power during this time (The server room HIT D 13 is excepted from this interruption). Shutdown your computer and switch off (use main switch if available or unplug) your electrical devices in advance to avoid local data loss and help prevent start-up peaks when electric power is switched back on.

Apart from the file-, mail- and web servers exists another crucial element of our core server infrastructure, namely the servers managing the account information and logins (LDAP). With a current uptime of a remarkable 550 days, it is time for an upgrade of the operating system and high-availability cluster software. For this reason we schedule a downtime on Wednesday 18th July between 07:00 and 08:00.

Most services will be affected and unavailable during that time, as they require an authentication with your D-Phys account (email, file server, print server, managed workstations). Note that, even though you will not be able to check your emails or send new ones, all incoming mails will be received and safely delivered to your inbox afterwards.

If everything goes smoothly, the actual downtime should be considerably less than the scheduled hour.

We have scheduled a downtime of the D-PHYS mail server for hardware maintenance on Friday, 1st of June 2012, starting after 4pm and lasting approximately half an hour. During the downtime sending and receiving mails will not be possible. Incoming mails will be slightly delayed.

Update 19:30h: Everything back again and looks fine. Performance may be slightly decreased for a day or so until the RAID has rebuilded.

Preparations took longer than expected, so we started later. The maintenance downtime itself also took longer due to some some unexpected issues which had to be resolved before we could continue start all service again. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.