This morning around 03:00 a water ingress in our HIT server room shut down most of our essential infrastructure servers. As soon as power was back around 08:00 we started to bring our services online.
Please let us know if you still experience any problems. We apologize for the inconvenience. I guess water and servers just don't mix very well.
Status 12:14 apart from the BackupPC server everything should be working again.
Our terminal server plimpy (uptime: 47 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 the Weekend, Saturday night June 19th in order to give the system a fresh start. We ask all users to save their data and log out of their thin clients.
BTW: Users of second generation thin clients (named tc00xx) are kindly invited to test our new ubuntu based terminal server plompy. If you're interested to give it a try, please let us know and we will configure your client.
Since the monthly password reminders of our mailing lists software Mailman have caused more confusion and unnecessary work than they seemed to help, from now on they are globally disabled on our mailing list server.
If you lost or forgot your password for the subscription of any of our mailing lists, you can always go to https://lists.phys.ethz.ch/listinfo, choose the appropriate list, scroll down to the bottom of that page, enter your e-mail address, click on "Unsubscribe or edit options", and then click on "Remind". Your password will be sent to your e-mail address.
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Because of performance problems on our Homefileserver we need to reboot the server tomorrow Wednesday, 28th of April 2010. This will cause a downtime between 07:00 and approximately 07:30.
This will result in a short service interruption for the home directories!
To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, it is best to close all open files on the home directories.
Update, 07:20: the homes are back...
Update, 09:45: various people experience login problems. We're working on it.
Update, Friday 10:00: problems resolved!
Printing currently doesn't work on most Macs. We're still trying to find the source of the problem.
Because of hardware problems with one of our infrastructure servers we couldn't perform the planned software upgrade on the IDL license server and Condor master server during the big maintenance downtime last week.
Those hardware problems are fixed now and so we will install the software upgrade on the IDL license and Condor master server tomorrow, Wednesday, 14th of April 2010, starting at 5 pm. Duration of the maintenance downtime will be approximately two hours.
Update, 20:20h: IDL License and Condor server are both back online.
In order to relieve our Terminal Server plimpy of some of its computational burden, we assigned it a new sidekick specifically targeted at number crunching tasks: plumpy.ethz.ch
So if you've been using plimpy to perform calculations in the past, please ssh into plumpy from now on and do your work there. This should make both you and the plimpy users happy. Thank you.
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.
