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.

Last night Microsoft has released the Security Bulletin Summary for November, 2008.
There are 1 critical and 1 important updates.
If Automatic Update is not activated yet, then you must visit Microsoft Update to install the Security Updates.

Currently our printer server "leuggel" is not available. It broke down completely over the weekend. We are currently setting up a temporary replacement. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update 13:37: The replacement printer server is up and printing is working again on all operating systems.

OpenID is a distributed authentication infrastructure which allows you to use your preferred authentication provider with a vast number of OpenID enabled services (e.g. many WordPress powered blogs like our completely renewed isg.phys.ethz.ch, Plaxo social networking, Identi.ca microblogging, SourceForge open source project hosting, etc.) without the need to give them your password or remember the password you set there.

Now you can also use your D-PHYS account on all these sites with our new OpenID Authentication provider, you can login on these sites using the URL https://openid.phys.ethz.ch/<YOUR D-PHYS USERNAME> as your OpenID.

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We upgraded our outdated Squishdot NIC website to WordPress. Hope y'all like it.

We provide an archive of our old Squishdot news directory.

Even though the list of our services has reached quite some extend, there are some special needs we cannot cover with our standard services. In well-founded cases we now offer virtualized Xen machines with full root access.

Please contact us if you think this could be for you.

Incited by the success of our Linux-based noiseless thin clients we were highly motivated to further increase the benefit of these clients to our users.

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of Windows logins on these machines.

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