On Wednesday, 7th of April 2010, starting at 6pm and lasting until approximately 9pm, there will be several maintenance downtimes for nearly all of our services due to several software upgrades and relocation of servers.

So if you're using one of our managed workstations or thin clients, or use data residing on group drives, please save all your work and preferably log out/disconnect before Wednesday, 6pm. And even if the services seem back after the first short downtime, don't expect to be able to work again from that point on since we will have several short but also some not so short service downtimes in a row.

Update, 20:30h: Most servers and workstations are back online. Not yet ready for usage are: fatboy, the IDL license server and the Condor master server. They will be back later tonight.

Update, 22:45h: fatboy is back online again. But two infrastructure servers (which haven't been touched by today's maintenance) seem to have hardware issues. Because of that the maintenance of the IDL license server and the Condor master server have been postponed until further notice.

On July 13th 2010, Windows 2000 Server/Professional and Windows XP Service Pack 2 will no longer be supported with security updates by Microsoft.

Machines running these operating systems should be upgraded to newer versions like Windows 7 or Server 2008 if they are directly connected to the D-PHYS network.

The IT Use Policy of ETH does not allow systems without an active patch cycle to be connected to the ETH network.

Please make sure that all computers running any of the affected operating systems have been migrated by July 13th 2010. The same also applies to even older systems like Win 9x or NT 4.0 of course.

More information about Microsoft Support Lifecycle can be found here.

We are happy to announce that our printer server now accepts print jobs sent by Windows 64bit-Clients.

Read our instructions if you are using our printer server.

On Thursday, 4th of May 2010, starting at 5pm we will migrate our webmail service to the new mail server. Since there are no version upgrades of the webmail applications Roundcube and Twig, it will be a smooth transition and you shouldn't even notice the migration. The only thing which can happen is that you get logged out of webmail if you use webmail while the DNS entry changes to the new server address.

Update, Thursday morning: As yesterday morning's unexpected outage of the old mail server showed further hardware problems, we rescheduled moving the incoming (SMTP) mail server functionality to the new mail server to fit into today's maintenance window, too.

This will also be done by switching DNS entries, so you should not experience any interruption nor do you need to change any configuration. However this may cause some temporary issues (e.g. delays) since it does involve new software versions as well as new authentication backends.

Update, 22:45: New webmail and incoming mail server seem to work fine, nearly all users already use the new service installation.

Our terminal server plimpy (uptime: 80 days) is slowly clogging up with runaway processes, eating up memory and CPU. Since we cannot tell apart good processes from bad ones, we schedule a maintenance reboot for tomorrow, Wednesday February 24 at 18:00 in order to give the system a fresh start. We ask all users to save their data and log out of their thin clients. Update, 18:45: Plimpy is up and running again.

On Thursday, 18th of February 2010, starting at 5pm there will be a mail service downtime for migrating the D-PHYS and FIRST mailing lists to the new mail server. During the downtime, no new mail can be sent or received and neither access to the mailing lists' web interface nor to the archive will be possible. E-mails sent to D-PHYS during the migration will be held back on the sender’s e-mail servers. Already received mail will be still accessible via IMAP or POP3. Update 9pm: Mailing lists moved to lists.phys.ethz.ch, everything should work fine again.

Together with the mailing list migration, there will come a policy change with regards to mailing lists:

All future mailing lists will be only "@lists.phys.ethz.ch" instead of "@phys.ethz.ch" as before.

Already existing mailing lists will be reachable under both, old "@phys.ethz.ch" or "@first.ethz.ch" as well as new "@lists.phys.ethz.ch" addresses.
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At around 8am we noticed (different) hardware issues with our SMTP server wiggis as well with one of our Xen hosting servers. This also affected the IDL license server. The problems have been temporarily solved and since approx. 10:30am both systems are working again as before. Expect though maintenance downtimes for those services within the next week.

Monday morning, February 8th 2010, we have to replace a broken system harddisk on one of the group fileservers. This will cause a downtime between 07:00 and approximately 07:30.

This will result in a short service interruption for all groupdrives!

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, it is best to close all open files on the group directories.

To prepare the next big step in our migration to the new mail server we will have a minor maintenance downtime of our SMTP server on Monday, the 1st of February 2010, starting on 5pm. During the downtime it won't be possible to send or receive new mails via SMTP nor will it be possible to use the mailing lists administrative interface. Mails sent to the Department of Physics during the downtime will be held back on the sending side and will be received afterwards. Mails already stored on our IMAP or POP3 server are accessible during the downtime though. Update, 17:25: Everything back to normal again.

If you're on the road a lot, you might be familiar with our webhome service which provides universal access to your home directory. While this can be a life-saver in some cases, there are a few limitations: a) you only get access to your home directory, b) it's only viable for single-file operations. The protocol of choice for remote file access across public firewalled networks is WebDAV. We are now happy to announce a WebDAV gateway to our file servers.

Should you be interested in using this service, please read our documentation page.