Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

Hardware upgrade in the student computer room HPV F 7.1

Monday, September 5th, 2011

We updated the hardware of 5 computers in the student computer room HPV F 7.1. With 4 GB of RAM and 3.0 Ghz processor from AMD they now have much more performance than the older ones. For identification, we have marked them with a blue label. These computers are available for public use within the usage policy while they're not being used for exercises.

Webserver upgrade on Wed, June 15

Friday, June 10th, 2011

On Wednesday, 15th of June 2011, starting at 3pm, we will upgrade the operating system of our webserver zwoelfi.ethz.ch. This implies a downtime of all websites and web-related services (including www.phys.ethz.ch, isg.phys.ethz.ch, lager.phys.ethz.ch, events.phys.ethz.ch, FIRST booking, all wikis and the groupware service) and most MySQL databases for several hours. As many of those websites have to be upgraded as well, they will successively come back online as we patch them up. We'll keep you posted as we proceed.

Update, 21:00: Basic web services are running again, some PHP based sites may still have smaller issues, Zope based sites may still have performance issues, too.

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.

Plumpy down due hardware failure

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Please use fatboy.ethz.ch instead until the 17th October 2010 max. The machine has 128 GB of memory and 4 Quadcores (AMD Opteron). You can also use /scratch but please move your data away until 17th October 2010. Please note that you may not use fatboy after this date.

Update Oct 18: the new hardware is installed. Please use plumpy again.
fatboy internals

Maintenance Downtime of IDL License and Condor Master Server on 14. April, 5 pm

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Because of hardware problems with one of our infrastructure servers we couldn't perform the planned software upgrade on the IDL license server and Condor master server during the big maintenance downtime last week.

Those hardware problems are fixed now and so we will install the software upgrade on the IDL license and Condor master server tomorrow, Wednesday, 14th of April 2010, starting at 5 pm. Duration of the maintenance downtime will be approximately two hours.

Update, 20:20h: IDL License and Condor server are both back online.

New computation node plumpy

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

In order to relieve our Terminal Server plimpy of some of its computational burden, we assigned it a new sidekick specifically targeted at number crunching tasks: plumpy.ethz.ch

So if you've been using plimpy to perform calculations in the past, please ssh into plumpy from now on and do your work there. This should make both you and the plimpy users happy. Thank you.

Maintenance Downtime of all Services on Wednesday, 7th of April 2010

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

On Wednesday, 7th of April 2010, starting at 6pm and lasting until approximately 9pm, there will be several maintenance downtimes for nearly all of our services due to several software upgrades and relocation of servers.

So if you're using one of our managed workstations or thin clients, or use data residing on group drives, please save all your work and preferably log out/disconnect before Wednesday, 6pm. And even if the services seem back after the first short downtime, don't expect to be able to work again from that point on since we will have several short but also some not so short service downtimes in a row.

Update, 20:30h: Most servers and workstations are back online. Not yet ready for usage are: fatboy, the IDL license server and the Condor master server. They will be back later tonight.

Update, 22:45h: fatboy is back online again. But two infrastructure servers (which haven't been touched by today's maintenance) seem to have hardware issues. Because of that the maintenance of the IDL license server and the Condor master server have been postponed until further notice.

Short maintenance downtimes of Terminal, Mail and Authentication Server

Friday, December 4th, 2009

There will be a semi-urgent maintenance reboot of our mail server and our terminal server "plimpy" today, Friday, 2009-Dec-04, at 6pm. So if you are using one of our thin clients, please save your work and log out before 6pm. Expected downtime durations: approximately 15 minutes for the terminal server "plimpy" and approximately 30 minutes for the mail server.

Additionally there will be a restart of our LDAP authentication database at the same time. This can cause logins on managed workstations or connections to file servers to fail temporarily, but should take no more than a minute or so.

Update, 7pm: Maintenance over. All systems back to normal. Terminal server was back in time, mail server needed a file system check so the downtime took slightly longer than expected. LDAP restart was a matter of seconds.

Linux Kernel Update

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

We installed new linux kernels for our systems and the machines need to be rebooted to run the new kernel. We will reboot the D-PHYS Linux Workstation "plimpy" this evening after 06:00 pm, not all the workstations. Please log out this evening before you go home, save all unsaved work and don't start any long running jobs.

The terminal server "plimpy" is affected as well, please save all your open documents and log out from your LTSP terminal. Thank you.

Linux Kernel Update

Monday, August 17th, 2009

We installed new linux kernels for our systems and the machines need to be rebooted to run the new kernel. We will reboot the D-PHYS Linux Workstations this evening after 08:00 pm. Please log out this evening before you go home, save all unsaved work and don't start any long running jobs. You may also reboot your workstation yourself earlier.