Tomorrow Tue March 17, starting from 0730, we will upgrade our Roundcube installation. Expected downtime: about 15 min.

Update Tue 0745: upgrade completed. Have fun.

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for March, 2009.
There are 1 critical and 2 important updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

The Informatikdienste of ETH will change their AFS policy by March 31 of this year. AFS functionality will be provided through a dataless AFS cell at ETH.
If you still require an AFS account which is connected to storage you need to act now and arrange an agreement for your use or move your data to some other place. Please consider the following points:

1. data on the ETH AFS server: This service will only be available under a contract with the Informatikdienste as a paid service. We recommend moving your data away from AFS if possible. NAS services (SMB/CIFS, NFS) are available from the Informatikdienste or the Department of Physics. Please ask the ISG D-PHYS if you need help or advice.
2. an AFS identity as user coming from the ETH: If you own data on other AFS servers around the world that are tied to your AFS identity from ETH you may want to keep your ETH AFS identity or transfer ownership to some other AFS identity. This service will be provided by Informatikdienste as a general service free of charge but only upon request. If you need this please let us (isg@phys.ethz.ch and tilo.steiger@id.ethz.ch) know.
3. access of AFS servers as an anonymous user: This service will continue for the foreseeable future without further action required from your side at this time.

Without a reaction from your side we assume that you don't need an AFS account anymore and you will become an anonymous user to AFS.

Note: you can use an AFS identity from another cell if you have one. You don't need an ETH AFS identity for that. E.g., to use your CERN AFS identity on the Linux workstations use klog -cell cern.ch

Further reading: Wer braucht noch AFS??? by Tilo Steiger at the ID-Blog

We need to move most of the group directories to a bigger fileserver.
This will be done on Thursday, 5. March, between 19:00 and 21:00.

During this time most some of the group directories (windata, macdata, unixdata) will be limited to read-only access, and the others will have a short interruption of availability.

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the group directories.

Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the group directories will still be accessible the same way as before, so you don't have to change anything.

Update 20:40: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)

We are service providers, and you are our customers. In order to be able to offer the best IT service possible, it is important for us to know what your needs and requirements are.

We therefore invite you to take this opportunity to tell us what we're good at, but especially what we still have to improve to best meet your IT needs. You can use the paper ballots outside of HPT D 19 or write an e-mail to isg@phys.ethz.ch, and you can participate either anonymously or provide your name if you want us to get back to you.

We explicitly invite our D-PHYS students to tell us your opinion! Do we offer what you need in your daily student life? Please let us know.

Thanks in advance for sharing your ISG experience with us. We'll pay heed to what you say!

Currently a great number of phishing e-mails are flooding the intarwebs, not all of which are being discarded by our spam filters.

Please remember that neither we nor ETH Informatikdienste would ever ask you to provide your account data, let alone via e-mail. Never ever send this information to anyone.

These e-mails are pretty well written, but sender addresses like <info@account.com> and <accountupgrade@j-mail.info> should make all your alarm bells go off.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for February, 2009.
There are 2 critical and 2 important updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

We had a partial DHCP outage this morning because the failover system between our two DHCP servers malfunctioned. The problem is currently solved only preliminarily by disabling the failover system and one of the two servers. To get both DHCP servers working again, we scheduled a DHCP server maintenance for today, Friday, 30th of January 2009, starting at 5pm. There may be short DHCP service outages during the maintenance. This means that initially connecting to the network as well as renewing the DHCP lease of your computer may fail for a few minutes. Update 21:45: The DHCP service is working again including the failover system.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow morning, 28th January 2009, 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 the following groupdrives:

• astro1, hhs, isg, iya, qo, qoarchiv, qpdata, rag, ragmast, ulp-stud, zimpol2, zimpol3

To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, it is best to close all open files on the group directories.

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for January, 2009.
There is 1 critical update.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.