Our D-PHYS mailing lists will be offline for maintenance on Thursday 6th June from early morning to approximately 10h00. No emails to @lists.phys.ethz.ch addresses will be accepted during that downtime.

Under the hood, the mailing list software will be migrated from mailman2 to mailman3. After the migration, the web page lists.phys.ethz.ch will have a new look with a modern web interface. You will be able to see and manage all your mailing lists right from the landing page. But note that all other URLs will have a new structure, so any browser bookmarks to individual mailing list configurations or archives will need to be updated.

For users that only receive messages from these mailing lists, nothing should change.

When sending messages to our mailing lists, pay attention, already now, to always use the <somelist>@lists.phys.ethz.ch domain. The obsolete <somelist>@phys.ethz.ch alias exceptions will no longer be accepted after the migration.

Mailing list owners and moderators will be contacted in a separate email with additional information, right after the migration. In particular, the new system will have personal accounts for all users, so that passwords must no longer be shared among list administrators. Also note that any held messages pending for moderation will not be migrated. So please accept or discard moderation requests the day before the migration.

Further documentation is available in our readme.

Scheduled maintenance will be taking place on our home.phys.ethz.ch file server on Wednesday, July 12, starting at 16:00. The service will be down for approximately 4 hours. We will be replacing the hardware with all-flash storage and upgrade the base system.

Update 18:15: the new home server is open for business. Most SMB + NFS clients will not have survived the 2h downtime and will have to be rebooted. We'll go through the most obvious ones, but if yours won't work, try restarting.

All home directories (Linux, Windows and Mac, SMB and NFS) will be unavailable during this time.

For emergency cases, you'll have read-only access to the backups as described here.

This migration will mark the end of the huge storage migration project of 2023. Thanks for your patience.

On Thursday, January 19, starting at 08:00, we will OS upgrade the main D-PHYS web server. All websites hosted on zwoelfi*.ethz.ch will be down for several hours and will gradually come back as we progress. This does not affect the department website, the institutes and many of the group websites. However our groupware, the wikis and many special interest sites will be inaccessible. Note that if you're using the ActiveSync connector via groupware to sync email to your cell phone or Outlook, this won't work either. Temporarily use webmail while we bring back groupware as one of the first services.

Update 17:30 - due to an inordinate amount of user files on the web server the upgrade took a bit longer than anticipated. Now almost all websites should be back online, please let us know if you encounter any problems.

On Thursday, July 21, starting at 0700 we will upgrade our groupware solution. The update is expected to take approximately one hour. As this upgrade will be a major one (version 14.3 to 16.1), you might notice a few changes. In particular:

• if you didn't log out before we start the upgrade, your browser might be in an inconsistent state and the new version might refuse to work. Just log out manually in this case.
• if you're using the ActiveSync/eSync/Exchange protocol for calendar synchronization, you will have to recreate your sync account on your (mobile) device. Just delete your existing account on the device (your groupware data will still be on our server) and add it again (see documentation). We're sorry for the inconvenience, but the synchronization code was rewritten to be faster and more stable and is not compatible to existing accounts. We have tried to identify all current ActiveSync users and will inform them via email.
• the web interface will get a new look (see screenshot)

We have thoroughly tested the new version internally. If you find any problems after the upgrade, please get in touch. Thanks.

Update Thursday 08:00: Upgrade complete. Please let us know if you find any issues in the new version.

On Thursday, the 9th of January 2014, starting in the late afternoon, we will run multiple software updates on the D-PHYS mail server. We do expect multiple downtimes throughout the evening, partially of single mail services, partially of the whole mail server.

This will likely also delay the delivery of incoming mails up to several hours.

Update, 22:30: Everything back to normal.

UPDATE Thu 12.09. 07:30 If you're trying to connect to a SMB share from an unmanaged Windows machine, you have to use "ad\USERNAME" instead of just "USERNAME" from now on.

UPDATE 21:15 apart from the IGP group shares (which will be back in a few hours) all systems are back to normal. Please let us know if you experience any problems.

In order to upgrade the operating system on several core infrastructure servers of the Department, we schedule a general maintenance downtime on

Wednesday September 11, starting at 17:00, lasting for several hours.

Most services will be affected and unavailable during that time, as they require an authentication with your D-PHYS account (email, file server, print server, managed workstations). Note that, even though you will not be able to check your emails or send new ones, all incoming mails will be received and safely delivered to your inbox afterwards.

Please make sure to save all open documents before 17:00 on that day.

Since we will also change the way file server mounts are authenticated, users who haven't updated their passwords in a very long time might not be able to mount their home directories or group shares after the migration. If you run into this problem on Thursday morning, please first change your password. If the issue persists, contact us.

We will post an update when things are back to normal.

For some years now we have been providing you with the nice webmail solution of the Roundcube project. Last night they released a new major version which we will install

tomorrow Thursday, August 9, at 07:00.

Note that for about 30 minutes you won't have access to Roundcube. The new version brings a very nice new theme (see screenshot) which we will be enable by default. If for some reason you'd like to keep the old one, you can switch back under Settings -> User Interface -> Interface skin.

Thu 07:15 Upgrade completed.

On Wednesday, 5th of October 2011, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on several servers of our mail server cluster. This will result in temporary unavailability of most e-mail related services we provide: sending and receiving e-mails, mailing lists and webmail access.

Due to the maintenance e-mails may have some lag and arrive a few hours later than usual.

Update, 21:55: Upgrade of the incoming and IMAP/webmail/mailing list servers were successful. Everything is back to normal.

On Monday, July 4, starting at 0700 we will upgrade our eGroupware installation to version 11.1. One of the most exciting features is the new ActiveSync plugin (incl. email push) that will also allow Android phones to sync calendar and contacts. We'll update our documentation as soon as 11.1 is running.

Update Monday 0930: the new version is installed and Android sync works. Read about it here.

We know printing is not always fun, and we hear your complaints. During the past few months we have been busy setting up a new print server that should solve most of today's problems (hopefully). We will deploy the new system on

Monday, April 4, at 07:30

The only change for you should be faster and more reliable printing. If you do experience any problems when printing, please let us know immediately so we can fix it.

Update 08:45 DNS confusion about old/new print server, we'll have to wait for the DNS cache to flush

Update April 5, 16:10 migration is done