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.
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:
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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!
