Inspired by an article in German computer magazine c't and Oliver Lau's accompanying software we now provide an interface that supplies hardware-generated random numbers for your everyday randomness needs - be it simulations or seeding your RNG algorithms. The random numbers are generated from the dark noise of a USB webcam and pass all standard RN tests like DIEHARD et al.
Tomorrow Thursday Jan 8 at 0730 we will upgrade our popular Roundcube webmail solution to a new version. This will cause a downtime of about 30 min. By way of consolation, we will provide a new theme that looks pretty nice. Look out for it in Personal settings -> User preferences -> Interface skin. It's called mvision2.
Update: Thursday 0745 - update done
The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Wednesday, 24th of December 2008 and Sunday, 4th of January 2009. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:
We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.
We also plan to maintain some of our infrastructure servers during the holidays, but this should not disrupt any essential service.
We found the solution for our long term PDF printing problems, which occurred mostly on Windows computers.
The latest workaround was to use the option print as image in Adobe Acrobat. This was very slow, and some times even that didn't work.
Please follow the instructions in this readme, if you have such problems!
For kernel security updates and other maintenance work, there will be a downtime of the e-mail server of the ETH Department of Physics from 17:00 on for about one hour.
Some weeks back we announced Windows logins on our Linux thin clients. If you're on one of our regular Linux machines and still would like to use some Windows-only program from time to time, you can of course get the same functionality by running rdesktop directly.
Please read our wiki page to learn how this is done.
Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for December, 2008.
There are 6 critical and 2 important updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.
On Tuesday, the 2nd of December 2008, beginning at 6pm, we will migrate the services on our current authentication server to our high-availability cluster. During the migration you will not be able to login on any of our managed workstations, home and group drives or web services. Existing login sessions on workstations should survive the downtime, but it is usually better if you log out before migration. Additionally, *.dhcp.phys.ethz.ch dynamic hostnames will not work either.
Update, 22:30: Migration done. Everything should be back to normal.
Update, Wed Dec 03, 09:30: We found and corrected a problem with the web browser proxy.pac.
Our web-based file manager is now available in a renovated version. Head over to http://webhome.phys.ethz.ch if you want to use this service.
Since Netbackup can't handle backups of PCs with intermittent network access (e.g. laptops or seldomly used lab PCs) nor MacOS X 10.5 or Windows Vista, there is a rising demand for backup of computers. For D-PHYS-owned laptops, laptops holding a relevant amount of ETH D-PHYS data, and for D-PHYS lab PCs, we now offer a backup service specifically targeted at computers with intermittent network access. It uses the free backup system BackupPC which does not need a local backup client to be installed on the computers to be backed up.
We ran the service in beta test for a couple of months and gathered a lot of experience with BackupPC. So we can now offer easy and regular backups of computers running any flavour of Linux and MacOS X, and---with the addition of locally installed 3rd party software (Cygwin)---also for Windows XP. Windows Vista as well as Windows XP without 3rd party software will follow. Read more about this service in our documentation wiki.
