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Home server maintenance on Tue, July 9, 17:00

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019

Update 20:10 Migration finished! Everything should work as normal.

In order to guarantee sustained performance and availability of our storage system, we schedule a maintenance downtime of our home directory server on

Tuesday, July 09, starting at 17:00

This only affects the home shares (technically: smb:\\home.phys.ethz.ch & /home/USERNAME). Email and group shares will have no interruption.

Since the server also needs a file system check, the downtime will take several hours.

For emergency cases, there will be read-only access to last night’s backup as described here .

We will update this posting once the home server is back online.

Maintenance downtime for group share and home directory fileservers

Friday, December 19th, 2014

UPDATE 13:30 - Groupdata is back online
UPDATE 02:25 - Astrogate and Windata are back online, except groupdata
UPDATE 22:20 - Home server is back online and email working again

In order to upgrade the operating system on serveral servers, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Sunday, 4th January 2015, starting at 22:00.

Schedule:

  • 22:15 start working on the home server (mail services disabled, incoming mail will be queued)
  • 22:20 start working on the group share servers (windata & astrogate)
  • ~ 22:45 home directories and mail services should work again
  • ~ 00:00 group shares will incrementally come back during the night
  • During the downtime you can access readonly backups of your data of the night before, take a look at our readme.

    We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

    Computer support during christmas holidays

    Friday, December 19th, 2014

    The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Wednesday, 24th of December 2014 and Sunday, 4th of January 2015. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

    • Switch off printers
    • Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
    • Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

    We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

    Computer support during christmas holidays

    Monday, December 23rd, 2013

    The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Tuesday, 24th of December 2013 and Friday, 3rd of January 2014. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

    • Switch off printers
    • Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
    • Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

    We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

    Computer support during christmas holidays

    Thursday, December 20th, 2012

    The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Monday, 24th of December 2012 and Monday, 2nd of January 2013. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

    • Switch off printers
    • Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
    • Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

    We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

    Maintenance downtime for group share fileserver

    Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

    In order to upgrade the operating system and the server hardware, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

    Wednesday, 12. September 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

    During this time, you will not have access to the group directories.

    We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption might cause.

    Migration of Home Directories

    Friday, March 16th, 2012

    In order to restructure the filesystem of the home directories, we schedule a migration on

    Wednesday, 28. March 2012, starting at 17:00 and lasting for several hours.

    During this time the home directories (winhome, machome, unixhome), the mail services and some websites will not be available.

    To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the home directories before the migration.

    Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the home directories will still be accessible the same way as before after the migration is over, so you don't have to change anything.

    Update 19:40 Migration completed. Every test we could think of passed. Please let us know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for your patience.

    Migration of Home Directories

    Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

    In order to gain more flexibility and performance, the home directories will move to our new SAN setup.

    This will be done on Thursday, 5. January 2012, between 18:00 and 22:00.

    During this time the home directories (winhome, machome, unixhome), the mail services and some websites will not be available.

    To protect you from losing or corrupting any of your files, we strongly recommend you close all open files on the home directories before the migration.

    Since we have switched to generic names for our services, the home directories will still be accessible the same way as before after the migration is over, so you don't have to change anything.

    Update, Jan 10: We experience some unexpected and dubious problems with 32bit binaries (and therefore, 32bit machines). The symptoms range from not being able to log in (GNOME and KDE) to acroread and mathematica not starting. Workarounds while we're working on a solution: for failing logins, please call us. For acroread, use evince instead. For mathematica, log in to a 64bit machine, eg. login.phys, and start it remotely.

    Update, 21:25: The migration is finished and everything should work again! In case of problems please contact the ISG Helpdesk (3 26 68)

    Computer support during christmas holidays

    Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

    The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Monday, 26th of December 2011 and Monday, 2nd of January 2012. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

    • Switch off printers
    • Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
    • Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

    We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.

    Computer support during christmas holidays

    Friday, December 24th, 2010

    The ETH Zurich will be officially closed between Friday, 24th of December 2010 and Sunday, 2nd of January 2011. During this time, we can only provide limited support. Please follow these rules to save us from superfluous work:

    • Switch off printers
    • Switch off your personal workstation and notebook except for the following:
    • Do not switch off our managed Linux workstations.

    We will try to follow our e-mail, but you may also have luck and meet some of us in our IRC channel.