Due to required changes to our network infrastructure and some hardware maintenance, we're scheduling a maintenance downtime for most D-PHYS servers starting on Thursday, 14th of April 2016, at 5pm. The downtime will last several hours and single services may be down for longer than others or will be down multiple times in a row.

We'll update this posting as soon as things are back to normal.

Most D-PHYS services will be affected by that downtime, especially file servers and e-mail services, but also some virtual machines and most websites hosted by ISG D-PHYS are affected. (http://www.phys.ethz.ch/ and other AEM-hosted websites are not affected.)

E-mails coming in during the downtime will be held on the sender's side and will arrive at D-PHYS with a delay. Sending e-mails won't be possible during the downtime either.

After the migration we will benefit from a faster and more reliable network connection to our servers.

Update at 19:30: Most services are back to normal. Expect further downtimes for home directories and mail later this evening.

Update at 23:00: All services are available again.

Update Fri 09:00: After Thursday's network migration a defective patch cable caused network problems on Friday morning.

We had to shut down the D-PHYS mail server on short notice for replacing faulty hardware. Mail service should be back in the evening.

Mails sent to D-PHYS during the downtime will be on hold on the sending side.

Update, 19:30: The dust is settling. We're soon back to normal.

In order to perform system-level maintenance work, we schedule a maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server today (Thursday, 2nd of July 2015) starting at 17:00. We expect the downtime to take about one hour.

During the downtime all mail services (sending mail, receiving mail, accessing mailboxes, webmail, etc.) will be unavailable. Mails sent to D-PHYS users during the downtime will be held back on the sending side and will be delivered after the downtime.

We will post an update as soon as mail services are back.

Update 19:30: Took a little bit longer than expected, but everything is back to normal now.

We have scheduled a software maintenance of the D-PHYS mail server for tomorrow, Wednesday, the 18th of June 2014, starting in the late afternoon around 5pm. A downtime of all D-PHYS mail services during the evening will be part of the maintenance. The downtime is expected to take approximately 15 to 30 minutes.

During the downtime sending and receiving e-mails will not be possible and the web mail service will be not available. Incoming mails during the downtime will be delayed.

Additionally there will be a downtime of our "BackupPC" backup service for laptops and lab PCs due to server relocation on Thursday (19th of June 2014) starting around 9am.

On Monday the public was made aware of a severe bug in OpenSSL, a cryptography library which is used as the core of many cryptographically secured IT services. Since the bug was in the Heartbeat extension it has been named "Heartbleed".

This bug allowed attackers to stealthily access parts of the memory used for cryptographic actions, i.e. it may include digital keys in use on servers or passwords transferred over encrypted connections.

If you used any password-protected D-PHYS web services or the D-PHYS mail server between 12th of December 2013 (or used the BackupPC web-interface since end of 2012) and Tuesday, the 8th of April 2014, there is a very small chance that your D-PHYS password and possibly other transmitted data may have been leaked to an attacker. We currently have no indication that this has actually happened on our servers.

To be safe, you might want to change the password of your D-PHYS account and any other account where the same password is used. See this Heise article for a discussion (in German) about whether you should change your password or not.

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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.

Starting on Wednesday, the 18th of December 2013 in the late afternoon, we will start upgrading the operating system as well as many web applications on the primary D-PHYS webserver. While we'll try to keep the downtimes as short as possible, some temporary service interruptions can't be avoided and are hence expected.

Potential issues with specific websites hosted on the D-PHYS webserver will be tackled in the days after the upgrade.

In the past we allowed sending e-mails over the D-PHYS mailserver from everywhere inside ETH to allow D-PHYS users to send e-mail via VPN or WiFi without the need to enter a password.

However the amount of misuse of this rule in the form of sending out spam from compromised machines inside ETH but outside D-PHYS raised significantly in the last few weeks.

Due to this development, we are forced to restrict password-less sending of e-mail via the D-PHYS mail server to a few D-PHYS networks — and in the future we might tighten this even more.

For now this means that you will need to authenticate yourself with your D-PHYS account, when sending e-mail via the D-PHYS mail server from outside D-PHYS. This includes sending e-mail via the ETH WiFi networks and connections via ETH VPN. This change is effective immediately.

Please see our documentation about how to send e-mails from outside D-PHYS if you need help reconfiguring your e-mail client.

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.