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.
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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.

Due to a critical condition on our systems we were forced to shut down our backup servers. This means there will be

No backup during this weekend.

Please be aware of this temporary limitation when producing large or important amounts of data. We apologize.

Today at 07:04 a software upgrade of a core router performed by Informatikdienste caused an avalanche of errors in our server cluster, leading to an outage of printing and some other non-critical services. It took us till around 08:00 to get the systems back to normal. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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

Today at 16:41 a process on our terminal server plimpy freaked out and consumed all memory + swap, causing a complete halt of all other processes. We had to reboot the machine. We're currently looking into ways to prevent this problem from appearing again in the future. Sorry for your inconvenience.

Today around 0715 we experienced a series of power outages in our water-cooled racks in HIT, leading to a shutdown of our most crucial servers. It took us almost two hours to get the systems up and running again, during which time most of our services were not available.

We apologize for any inconvenience.