The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Thursday, 24th of December 2009 and Sunday, 3th of January 2010. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

• Switch off printers
• Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
• Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

Tomorrow Wednesday Dec 09, starting at 0730, we will upgrade our eGroupWare collaboration software (https://groupware.phys.ethz.ch/) to a new revision. The service will be down for about 30 min. The update addresses several known issues and should restore the SyncML functionality.

There will be a semi-urgent maintenance reboot of our mail server and our terminal server "plimpy" today, Friday, 2009-Dec-04, at 6pm. So if you are using one of our thin clients, please save your work and log out before 6pm. Expected downtime durations: approximately 15 minutes for the terminal server "plimpy" and approximately 30 minutes for the mail server.

Additionally there will be a restart of our LDAP authentication database at the same time. This can cause logins on managed workstations or connections to file servers to fail temporarily, but should take no more than a minute or so.

Update, 7pm: Maintenance over. All systems back to normal. Terminal server was back in time, mail server needed a file system check so the downtime took slightly longer than expected. LDAP restart was a matter of seconds.

On Monday, November 16th, starting at 6pm we will migrate the D-PHYS IMAP and POP3 server to new hardware. Since this also includes converting all 450 GB of mailboxes on that server, the migration will take several hours. Update Tuesday, 2:50pm: Everything works again. The migration took about twice of the expected time due to some complications.

During the migration it will not be possible to access any of the D-PHYS e-mail services (receiving, sending or accessing your mails, webmail). E-mails sent to D-PHYS during the migration will be held back on the sender's e-mail servers.

After the migration you may need to resynchronise your e-mail client (e.g. Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird) with the new IMAP server. Please read our mail server migration wiki page in case you use one of the e-mail clients mentioned above, use your own procmail filter rules or experience other problems after the migration.
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Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for November, 2009.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

The current wave of password phishing mails seems to provoke an unusually high attention rate.  People seem to think that mail allegedly coming from help@ethz.ch may be genuine.  The german text itself is so bad that its spammy character is obvious to long time mail users.

Remember: any part of a mail can be faked. This is in the design of the mail system and cannot be fixed without making mail usage a lot harder for everybody.  And even if we used a better system (like cryptographic signatures) the rest of the world would not follow.

Therefore, be sceptic about any mail until the complete impression including the writing style fits the picture.  No IT support worth their salt will ask you to reveal your password.  And if they do they deserve to be ignored!

Tomorrow Tue Nov 3, starting from 0730 we will upgrade our eGroupware service to version EPL 9.1. Expected downtime: about one hour.

We installed new linux kernels for our systems and the machines need to be rebooted to run the new kernel. We will reboot the D-PHYS Linux Workstation "plimpy" this evening after 06:00 pm, not all the workstations. Please log out this evening before you go home, save all unsaved work and don't start any long running jobs.

The terminal server "plimpy" is affected as well, please save all your open documents and log out from your LTSP terminal. Thank you.

To get more free space for the home directories we need to move to a bigger fileserver.
This will be done on Thursday, 29. October, between 18:00 and 21:00.

During this time the home directories (winhome, machome, unixhome), the mail services and some websites will be not available.

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the home directories.

Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the home directories will still be accessible the same way as before, so you don't have to change anything.

Update 21:05: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for October, 2009.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.