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!

UPDATE: the power test has been cancelled. Helpdesk duty as usual.

On Thursday, December 20, ETH facility services will conduct extensive power network tests in the HPT building, where ISG (and hence the helpdesk) is located. We were told to expect at least one power cut lasting at least 15 min, possibly longer. 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: 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.