This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We’ve been hard at work to further improve and extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2014:

• eXile: in order to be able to keep Windows XP machines that cannot be upgraded connected to the network, we have created the exile system of dedicated virtual firewalls. Currently there are 57 computers safely hidden in this network.
• Security flaws: 2014 saw the disclosure of three rather severe and widespread security problems in quick succession: Heartbleed, Shellshock and Poodle. We patched all affected systems within hours of the announcements and also scanned the network for hosts that had been overlooked. If you're managing any networked machines (not just servers!) yourself, please make sure those are not vulnerable.
• Outages: we had a major incident on August 27 due to a failure of the server room cooling system. Fortunately we were able to repair the damage within hours. Other than that, our systems have been very stable in 2014 and we only had minor issues.
• Storage: in 2014 the disk space occupied by data and backup grew from 535 TiB to 685 TiB, further increasing the yearly growth rate. Another 120 TiB are already in the pipeline.
• Printing: in cooperation with Informatikdienste we prepared and introduced the new ETH printing system in D-PHYS. Several groups have migrated already, the rest of D-PHYS will follow in 2015.
• IPv6: during the last 12 months we prepared the D-PHYS network for dual stack (IPv4 + IPv6) operation. The biggest step towards a working IPv6 infrastructure was the deployment of an IPv6-ready DHCP server. Beginning next January we will incrementally hand out IPv6 addresses in the D-PHYS network. Later on, we'll make our services IPv6-ready.
• Brain drain: two ISG group members decided to take on new challenges this year. In November, Thomas Berchtold left us after 3 successful years to become the new Head of IT of D-BAUG, and Elmar Heeb, the founding father of ISG D-PHYS, will start his new job in Informatikdienste in February. We thank both Thomas and Elmar for their dedicated work and contribution to the team and hope to stay in regular contact with them in the future. Christian Ringger will replace Thomas in January, while Elmar's succession is still work in progress.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2015!

This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We've been hard at work to further improve and extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2013:

• New apprentice: As of August 14, Anastassios has started his apprenticeship with us and is already deeply involved in a complex PHP/Ajax/PostgreSQL project. Keep it up!
• Mailserver: This year saw a massive increase in spam and especially phishing attacks. They're getting more and more sophisticated and now include valid logos and even personal names. We were forced to tighten email policies and further fortify our mail server in order to battle those waves.
• Backup: For the data on our file servers we provide one month of nightly backups. Now our powerful backup system based on COW BTRFS snapshots allows us to extend this period to up to one year in exponential intervals for most file systems. Note that anything beyond 30 days is best-effort only and we might have to cut back again in single cases. A new web frontend shows the status of all backup runs.
• Windows server: Several Windows server installations have been moved to a new powerful virtualization server and the Active Directory setup has been improved.
• Printer portal: All information regarding our printers can now be found on one website. You might want to check there if you have issues with a particular printer or just to get an idea about printing volume.
• Portal for managed workstations: Our new Chic! frontend shows the software status of our managed Windows and Mac workstations and allows you to request additional software packages. This service will be officially announced in January 2014.
• GitLab: We run a GitLab instance to facilitate collaborative programming projects and sharing of code. Get in touch if you'd like to use it.
• System upgrades: 2013 brought another round of OS upgrades, also for our servers. We updated most servers silently and combined all critical systems into one migration on September 11 in order to minimize downtime for our users.
• Windows XP exile: As reported previously, Windows XP will be end-of-life in April 2014. Since there's still a substantial number of XP machines out there (most of which cannot be upgraded due to soft- or hardware constraints), we'll provide a locked-down exile network that will allow a limited and well-controlled survival of those machines under certain conditions. We'll post an announcement when the system is ready.
• IPv6: This year we laid the groundwork for the slow migration towards IPv6 connectivity in our networks. In particular, we got our monitoring system IPv6-ready and prepared a NFSv4 rollout. We'll keep you posted about our IPv6 progress.

Apart from these highlights, of course there have been numerous small projects and improvements to our setup, making both your and our life easier.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my whole team for their hard and dedicated work all year long.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2014!

This post is meant to give you a short overview of what has been accomplished in D-PHYS IT by ISG this year. We've been hard at work to further improve and extend our services for you, our customers. Some highlights of 2012:

• Integration of IGP's IT into ours: as you might recall, our coworker Thomas is actually paid by D-BAUG's IGP institute in exchange for us providing our IT services to their users. For the last 12 months, we have migrated their servers, data, users and software into our setup so that in future we can all profit from a unified solution
• File servers and backup: after some difficulties earlier this year our file server and backup infrastructure is now rock solid and ready for the fast growth in data volume that we expect in the next years. All disk backends have been intregrated into our SAN setup and are connected via either Infiniband or 10G ethernet for maximum speed. Just yesterday we passed the 1 PB mark in file server disk space. Yes, that's 1024 TB.
• Mail server bottleneck: also in spring, the sporadic performance bottleneck on our mail server could be found and fixed. The server is now running on full steam again
• Personal user groups: probably completely unnoticed by our customers, all user D-PHYS accounts have been migrated to personal user groups this year. While this has been the standard behavior on modern Unix systems for many years now, our LDAP directory dates back to SunOS which combined all user accounts into one ''staff'' group. Not a big deal for you, but makes life much easier for us.
• Group share reporting: in order to provide a better overview of space allocation and usage on our group shares, we introduced a periodic report email containing the link to an interactive usage graph.
• Mac OS X 10.7: the Mac workstations have been migrated to OS X 10.7, building a unified setup to facilitate software distribution
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: the Linux workstations were upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, a long-term support (LTS) version that benefits from an extended support cycle.

Apart from these highlights, of course there have been numerous small projects and improvements to our setup, making both your and our life easier.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my whole team for their hard and dedicated work all year long.

Happy Holidays and see you in 2013!