Today around 14:20 the D-PHYS network started acting up. After about 20 minutes the problem could be tracked down to a machine running amok. Unfortunately, the terminal server plimpy did not survive the downtime and had to be rebooted at 16:10. We apologize for any inconvenience.
We will upgrade our LTSP server "plimpy" the next Wednesday, 24 June 2009 starting at 7 pm. Please save all your open documents and log out until that time. The machine should be ready again the next morning. You don't have to back up your data on /scratch since we will do that. Find the details on the software changes here.
While performing the upgrade to Debian "lenny" we will switch to a 64 bit kernel since finally also Adobe flash player, the last missing mission-critical app, is now available for 64 bit Linux. Unfortunately Adobe still doesn't ship 64 bit Linux versions of Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader). You can still fill Adobe Reader PDF forms and even create and edit PDF documents on the Windows RDP Server "ramora" which you can access via the ETH Zurich menu, Microsoft Office (or the full-screen login, see above link).
Of course 'UPGRADE YOUR ETHZ E-Mail-Konto.' is a phishing attempt. And not a bad one at that. The German is halfway correct and they even used different From: and Reply-To: addresses. But still: no administrator worth her title would ever ask for a password. Please delete.
Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for June, 2009.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.
Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for May, 2009.
There is 1 critical update.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.
Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for April, 2009.
There are 5 critical, 2 important and 1 moderate updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.
There will be a short maintenance downtime of our authentication server this evening at 7pm. This means that you won't be able to log in to any managed D-PHYS workstation or D-PHYS service for about 5 minutes. Update 19:01: Maintenance successfully over.
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On Wednesday, April 8, starting around 0730 we will upgrade the RAM in plimpy, our LTSP terminal server. This will cause a downtime of about 5 min and the loss of all open sessions. Please make sure to have all your data saved by Tue evening if you're working on a thin client.
Update Wed 0800: plimpy now has 16 gigs.
For a long time we used so called wildcard SSL certificates for most of our web sites and services. Especially newer web browsers issued warnings about them. We recently exchanged the wildcard certificate on https://www.phys.ethz.ch/ and other websites to a new type of SSL certificate listing all websites hosted on that machine. Since today also our infrastructure servers (e.g. https://registration.phys.ethz.ch/), have such a new SSL certificate.
If you have installed our CA certificate as described in our article How to configure web browsers, the new certificates won't cause any more security warnings. If you have not installed our CA certificate in your web browser, a warning about a new unknown certificate will pop up for many of our SSL-enabled websites every time we add a new website. Because a new website means that we have to generate a new SSL certificate for the whole web server the new site is hosted on. We therefore recommend to install our CA certificate in your web browser to avoid those annoying warnings on D-PHYS websites.
All computers in the D-PHYS network have to be registered with their MAC address. This is an important measure to ensure the security and integrity of our network. In order to alleviate the inconvenience this might cause in some cases, we now allow expired machines to be reactivated not only by us, but also by their admins and deputies. To this end we have created the website
which allows you to easily reactivate all expired machines you're registered as an admin or deputy for. We hope to save us all some time with this new service.
