Historically the D-PHYS print server has been accessible under the host name printer.ethz.ch. As it turns out, this name violates ID’s DNS rules and they have requested we change it. We therefore have modified all references pointing to printer.ethz.ch to now address printer.phys.ethz.ch. We have incorporated some technical solutions that redirect many connections automatically, and also our managed workstations have been migrated, but there might be individual configurations that need manual intervention. So if printing stops working after Wednesday evening, you might have to change the print server address — see our printing documentation.
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We will perform a maintenance reboot of several infrastructure servers on Thursday, 16th of May 2013, starting around 5pm. This will cause a downtime of all e-mail related services (receiving + sending mail, accessing webmail and non-cached mails) as well as the license server for IDL, the control server for Condor grid computing, and most hosted virtual machines.

We expect the downtimes to be short and sequential.

Update 17:50: Everything went fine, we’re back to normal.

On Monday, March 25, ISG will be on an all-day field trip to CERN. No mails, tickets or phone calls will be answered on that day. We’ll catch up with your requests on Tuesday.

Last night the regular daily software update on the managed Ubuntu workstations removed the network-manager package. This left most of the workstations unusable. We are working to restore the network connectivity.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

This post might help to clarify some questions related to the warranty conditions of new hardware. It is the result of internal inquiries we performed in reply to customer requests. Skip if you’re not interested.

Switzerland, like other European countries, knows two forms of liability a vendor has to/can offer to clients of its hardware products: Gewährleistung and Garantie.

• Gewährleistung is mandated by law and covers basic liability if a piece of hardware fails. In Switzerland, Gewährleistung was just extended from 12 to 24 months on Jan 1st, 2013. This means that for the first two years, any defect whose cause was already present at the time of purchase has to be covered by the vendor. As you can probably guess, the part in italic can be the crucial one.
• Garantie is a voluntary service offered by most, but not all vendors. Its conditions can be pretty freely chosen by the vendor, unlike Gewährleistung where the terms are given by law. Garantie can cover a wider range of defects and it can also be a service you have to pay for.

Now how does this matter to you? Let’s take a current real life example: you’d like to buy a new Apple MacBook Pro 13″. Right now, you have a number of interesting options:

• Neptun: CHF 1305.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 3 years of Apple Garantie (price of Apple Care included)
• Dataquest: CHF 1240.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 2 years of Dataquest Garantie. Additionally, you can pay CHF 99.- for a third year of Dataquest Garantie.
• Apple EDU Store: CHF 1268.-, 2 years of Gewährleistung (by law), 1 year of Apple Garantie. Additionally, you can pay CHF 210.- for another 2 years of Apple Garantie. IDES offers the same to ETH employees for CHF 195.-

It’s hard to tell if the conditions of the additional Garantie are really more accommodating than those of the mandatory Gewährleistung. Wear parts like the battery for example are typically covered by neither. Harddisks on the other hand (most common failing part in a laptop) should be covered by both. In the end the best option will also depend on your usage pattern and the expected life time of your device. Regardless of the type of warranty you have, you should always report any problem you’d like to get fixed as soon as possible.

Sources:
Apple warranty conditions
Computer World article

Apparently this time they mean it:

On Thursday, February 14, ETH facility services will conduct extensive power network tests in the HPT building, where ISG (and hence the helpdesk) is located. Power will be gone for ~ 2 hours starting around 13:30. During this time we will not be able to answer the helpdesk phone or work on your tickets. We’ll post an update when power is back.

Update, 10:30h: We’re already offline since in other floors of the building power has already been cut and caused a network outage on other floors.

For the last 4.5 years, our customers could choose from two webmail solutions: Roundcube and TWIG. With the introduction of Roundcube we announced the eventual removal of the old TWIG service which hasn’t been updated in years and poses a serious risk in terms of security and spam distribution. Now the time has come to finally turn it off. All remaining TWIG users: please switch to Roundcube, TWIG will be disabled tomorrow, February 5, 2013.

Update: The upgrade to FM12 is completed.

Usually Filemaker upgrades are pretty seamless as newer clients can deal with older server versions. This time however the Filemaker company decided to implement major changes into their FM12 upgrade that require a new database format. This means that FM12 server can’t talk to FM11 clients and vice versa. Hence we have to upgrade both server and client in one go.
This migration will take place on

Monday, February 11, starting at 17:00.

This upgrade will affect you if you either:
a) use remote databases from fm.phys.ethz.ch,
b) use one of our managed workstations on which the client will be upgraded, or
c) both.

Actually, case c) will be the easiest as after the migration things should just work again on FM12. In case of a) you’ll have to make sure that you upgrade your local FM11 client before you can continue using our remote databases (see this howto). For b): if you’re on a managed workstation, you’ll find the new FM12 client on Tuesday morning. If you’re working with local databases (not from fm.phys.ethz.ch), you’ll have to upgrade those databases to the FM12 format. FM12 will do this for you automatically when you open FM11 databases for the first time.
The server migration itself will probably take one hour during which time the remote databases on fm.phys.ethz.ch will NOT be available. The clients will be installed during the night Monday -> Tuesday. If you need access on your managed workstation on Monday evening after ~18:00, please let us know so that we can upgrade the client on your machine earlier.

Tomorrow,

Tuesday, January 29, starting at 07:15 am

there will be a short downtime of our LDAP server since we have to perform some maintenance work. You will not be able to log in or use our file services during this downtime. The expected duration is < 15 min however, so most of you won’t even notice.

We are very pleased to introduce Anastassios Martakos!

In the mid of January he started as a trainee in our group and is going to slide over to a regular apprenticeship as an IT Systems Engineer in the ISG D-PHYS. He is currently picking up basic Unix skills and helps us to pull up a demo setup for a cloud based storage solution. In his spare time he already gained IT experiences in programming impressive 3D games.

Welcome to our group Anastassios! We wish you an interesting time in our field of work!