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.

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.