Following recent incidents we would like to remind you as well as stress that our terminal servers plimpy.ethz.ch and plompy.ethz.ch must not be used for long running or resource demanding computation jobs. Please use our computation node plumpy.ethz.ch instead.
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If you have ever wondered what keeps the friendly people of ISG busy all day long, your wait is now over. In the upper right corner on our website you can now find a little box with some interesting numbers about the computing resources at D-PHYS. They are updated every night and right now look like this:
We are happy to announce that our ticket system now allows you to track the status of your tickets at ISG D-PHYS.
We will continue to refrain from sending out ticket confirmation emails, but you can now log in to https://rt.phys.ethz.ch/rt in order to check progress on your requests.
If you are using your regular D-PHYS email address when emailing us, just type in your D-PHYS login to gain access. In case you opened your tickets from an external email account, use the Forgot Your Password feature on the login page to request a password for this email address.
Please let us know if you encounter any problems when using this service.
The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Friday, 24th of December 2010 and Sunday, 2nd of January 2011. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:
We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.
In the past all HTTPS secured web sites hosted or provided by us used certificates issued by ourselves. This caused unsettling warnings in most browsers as the user had to manually add the root certificate of our certification authority (CA) to his web browser.
To allow SSL certificates other than those signed by ourselves, namely certificates automatically accepted by all browsers, but also community-backed CACert certificates issued by ETH ID, we will change the configuration of our web server zwoelfi this evening. This may cause some short interruptions to some of the hosted sites, but should not be of longer duration.
Some of these web sites will get already new SSL certificates issued by QuoVadis (accepted by nearly all browsers by default) this evening.
Update Friday, 1. Oct. 2010, 21:00h: Due to several unexpected issues with the new QuoVadis certificate, for now the webserver runs again with the old ISG signed SSL certificate on all virtual hosts.
Update Thursday, 7. Oct. 2010, 23:00h: Most of the issues with the new QuoVadis certificate are solved now and all virtual hosts planned for the QuoVadis SSL certificate use it now again.
Please use fatboy.ethz.ch instead until the 17th October 2010 max. The machine has 128 GB of memory and 4 Quadcores (AMD Opteron). You can also use /scratch but please move your data away until 17th October 2010. Please note that you may not use fatboy after this date.
Update Oct 18: the new hardware is installed. Please use plumpy again.
On Friday, September 17, at 22:00, we will have to extraordinarily reboot our 64-bit Ubuntu workstations in order to deal with a nasty security issue. We're sorry for the short notice but we've been unpleasantly surprised by this just as much as you have. If you're reading this in time, please save all your data and log out if you can. Please note that also the terminal servers plimpy, plompy, plempy and plumpy (yes I know..) are affected. Thank you.
Today we are pleased to announce the D-PHYS eGroupware collaborative calendar solution http://groupware.phys.ethz.ch. We have put a lot of effort into the task of finding a groupware package that works with as many different clients as possible and offers the widest range of features. So if a synchronized calendar service could be interesting for you, give it a shot. Please also consult our readme detailing the different sync solutions.
If you're still using our much older https://webcal.phys.ethz.ch/, please move on to eGroupware as soon as possible. This service will eventually be discontinued.
Our managed workstations (especially the ones running Linux) feature a very wide range of software packages. Most of these programs are supplied directly by the distribution (Debian, Ubuntu), but some others (most of them proprietarily licensed) have to be manually maintained by us. Sometimes, upgrading one of these software packages to a new major release might cause problems for expert users of that program - for instance if they rely on a function specific to one version. In order to prepare those pro users for upcoming major upgrades, we have created a new mailing list on which we'll announce these updates.
So if you're heavily using programs like Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, IDL, the Intel C and Fortran compilers or DS9, please go to
https://lists.phys.ethz.ch/listinfo/software-updates
and subscribe to this mailing list.
A firmware update on the RAID controller of our file server requires a reboot of this server. We schedule the reboot on Wednesday August 4, at 22:00. The downtime should take no more than 30 min. Please make sure all your data has been saved at that point.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Update, 22:20: The server has rebooted and everything should work again.
