ISG sits on a pile of older hardware that for various reasons cannot be used in our setup any more but that many people have expressed interest in. Following standard procedure we have first offered it for ETH internal deployment, and whatever is left can now be purchased for private use. These are mainly pre-Intel Macs and Shuttle barebones. In order to ensure complete fairness and not to privilege anyone, the following rules apply to everybody who's interested in buying:

General rules

• this goes to all D-PHYS members
• 1 item per person
• there's no warranty or service whatsoever. All devices have successfully been turned on, but that's it
• if your item doesn't turn on, you can bring it back within 5 days and get a full refund - but only then. No refund if you don't like it
• no OS, no software, no manual, no keyboard, no cables. You get one piece of hardware. All HDs are blank
• computers are CHF 100.-, monitors are 50.- - these are not our prices, but http://www.rechtssammlung.ethz.ch/pdf/220_Inventarwesen_Jan06.pdf
• all proceeds go to the D-PHYS funds, not ISG
• if you have no use for a computer without OS or software, don't come shopping

Registration

• first-register-first-serve basis
• register at https://isg.phys.ethz.ch/isgsale/ - you will get a number that determines your place in the queue
• registration closes Mon, July 11, 2011, the sale itself will be on Fri, July 15, 2011
• on July 11, 2011 we will publish the schedule on https://isg.phys.ethz.ch/isgsale/ - find your number and come to HPT D 1.2 at the time indicated. Don't come earlier, you'll just have to wait
• bring cash. The right amount - we don't have change

The sale itself

• 5 people at a time will be able to pick from what's left
• 1 item per person - NO EXCEPTIONS
• pay cash, no change
• take your item with you and have fun
• if your item doesn't turn on, get a refund within 5 days

On Wednesday, 15th of June 2011, starting at 3pm, we will upgrade the operating system of our webserver zwoelfi.ethz.ch. This implies a downtime of all websites and web-related services (including www.phys.ethz.ch, isg.phys.ethz.ch, lager.phys.ethz.ch, events.phys.ethz.ch, FIRST booking, all wikis and the groupware service) and most MySQL databases for several hours. As many of those websites have to be upgraded as well, they will successively come back online as we patch them up. We'll keep you posted as we proceed.

Update, 21:00: Basic web services are running again, some PHP based sites may still have smaller issues, Zope based sites may still have performance issues, too.

We developed a real-time monitoring of the number of pages printed in physics department. We keep track of the printed pages on each printer and the total for our two servers (cups and winprinter). The results are plotted on our printer homepage printer.ethz.ch. Clicking on the upper graph shows you more details, as well as the statistics over the last 30days. Moreover you can click on the little "Stats" icon next to each printer, to see its individual statistics.

These statistics not only help us to monitor and debug our printers, but should also make everyone aware of the large amount of pages printed in D-Phys, namely that more than 5000 pages are printed every single workday.

Please be eco-friendly and print only when you need to.

We just deployed new SSL certificates for some of our services. Sending e-mails via our mail server no longer requires the import of our root CA certificate beforehand, but may require a restart of your e-mail client. Internal websites (like account management and password changing) or websites which are hosted by us and don't end in .ethz.ch got new certificates signed by our new root CA certificate. To avoid annoying and irritating warnings, we recommend you import our root CA certificate into your web browser.

The new root certificate will be installed in the web browsers on our managed workstations within the next days, too.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, we would like to give a status update after the print server migration. Somewhat contrary to popular belief, the overall situation with printing has improved quite a lot. Most combinations of operating systems, client programs, file formats and printers work very well, with two notable exceptions:

• Mac OS X 10.6.7: printing some PDFs from non-Adobe programs on some printers fails. We're working on a solution. Either use Adobe Reader/Acrobat or print on any other printer. This problem is introduced with the 10.6.7 update. You'll have to use the Acroread workaround until we find a solution.  SOLVED: Apple released an official patch to fix the problems with fonts. Please update your computer.
• Macs: the LPD way of printing (readme) currently does not work. Again, we're working on it. Use CUPS in the meantime. SOLVED

As a reminder, please let us know immediately if apart from the above-mentioned cases you still experience printing issues.

The new print server solved many of the problems that were troubling you (and us) in the past. Unfortunately, it seems it also introduced a couple of new ones. In order for us to be able to address them, it is very important that we know about them in the first place. We hadn't seen those issues in our months-long tests, otherwise we wouldn't have deployed the new server. So, pretty please with sugar on top, call us immediately if your print job does not come out as expected. A problem description like "it hasn't been working for weeks" does not help anyone. Please call us, we're working hard to find and eliminate those issues. Thank you.

On Wednesday, the 6th of April 2011, starting around 5pm we will upgrade the operating system on the two D-PHYS DHCP servers. This should not cause any interruptions for computers which are already online, but computers which connect to our network between 5pm and 6pm may not get an IP address assigned immediately. As these computers mostly will be mobile devices, we suggest to switch to the wireless network instead for that evening.

We know printing is not always fun, and we hear your complaints. During the past few months we have been busy setting up a new print server that should solve most of today's problems (hopefully). We will deploy the new system on

Monday, April 4, at 07:30

The only change for you should be faster and more reliable printing. If you do experience any problems when printing, please let us know immediately so we can fix it.

Update 08:45 DNS confusion about old/new print server, we'll have to wait for the DNS cache to flush

Update April 5, 16:10 migration is done

Time for our biennial customer satisfaction poll!

We are service providers, and you are our customers. In order to be able to offer the best IT service possible, it is important for us to know what your needs and requirements are.

We therefore invite you to take this opportunity to tell us what we're good at, but especially what we still have to improve to best meet your IT needs. You can use the paper ballots outside of HPT D 19, write an e-mail to herzog@phys.ethz.ch, or use the form below to submit your feedback, and you can participate either anonymously or provide your name if you want us to get back to you.

We explicitly invite our D-PHYS students to tell us your opinion! Do we offer what you need in your daily student life? Please let us know.

We also plan to organize a visitation of our HIT server room. So if you'd like to see where your files and e-mails spend their days, please let us know too.

Thanks in advance for sharing your ISG experience with us. We'll pay heed to what you say!

It is our pleasure to welcome Dr. Claude Becker in our team. He will replace Kati Zehnder as our Mac specialist as Kati decided to continue her career in the ETH Informatikdienste. We would like to thank Kati for her commitment in the last 3.5 years and are looking forward to a productive and inspiring collaboration with Claude.