Today at 09:50 a crucial server died in our HIT server room. It took us about 20 min to move the affected services to other machines, during which time most of our machines weren't usable. We're sorry for the inconvenience. We're working hard to get rid of this fault-prone hardware.
On Wed Sep 23 around 01:00 a major power outage hit Höngg and Affoltern. Our servers on the Hönggerberg campus switched to battery power, but since power was gone for more than 3 h, the batteries eventually drained and all servers switched off. Around 07:15 we began rebooting our infrastructure servers, but it wasn't until noon that the most important services (home, web, mail) were back up. Please bear with us while we still iron out the last remaining issues.
On Thursday, 24th of September 2009 starting at 5pm there will be a maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server. Estimated duration is one hour. During the downtime, the mail server will not be able to receive or send e-mails nor will it be possible to log in via IMAP, POP3 or SSH. Update, 6pm: Everything back to normal. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for September, 2009.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.
A security-update on one of our clusters failed unexpectedly and caused a downtime of our authentication server and printer server which needed manual intervention. All services should be back again by now. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this. Update 18:00: The thin clients work again, too.
Tomorrow Tue September 8, starting from 0730, we will upgrade our Roundcube installation. Expected downtime: about 15 min.
Update Tue 0734: upgrade done.
On Thursday, the 27th of August 2009 around 16:00 we will start upgrading the operating system and the webserver software of our main webserver zwoelfi. This may lead to a downtime of many websites at D-PHYS including www.phys.ethz.ch and isg.phys.ethz.ch. Update 21:20: All services should be back to normal again.
Read the rest of this entry »
In case you've been wondering about the slightly dubious announcements of the past few days: on Friday (2009/08/14) a local privilege escalation in all Linux kernels of the last 7 years was published, together with an exploit. Unfortunately no patched kernels were available by Friday late afternoon, which put us into an awkward position. Generally it is not our policy to be sneaky about security issues, but in this case we really did not want to attract malicious script kiddies. That's why we decided to keep our announcements somewhat vague. By now the worst seems to be over and all machines have been rebooted with patched kernels.
We apologize for any confusion or service degradation this episode may have caused on your side.
The update also affects "plimpy", our LTSP server. Please remember to save all your documents and log out this evening.
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 Workstations this evening after 08:00 pm. Please log out this evening before you go home, save all unsaved work and don't start any long running jobs. You may also reboot your workstation yourself earlier.
