April 2005 Archives

April 27, 2005

Systems Suggish

Mathserv and the msprime felt sluggish much of this morning and yesterday afternoon, the reason being that mathserv was receiving a large amount of data from a computational job on bayes (the Stats server). The systems are loping along again as of ca. 12:30 pm today.

2:36 PM

April 25, 2005

Virus/Trojan Making the Rounds

Variants of the MyDoom trojan are making the rounds again, this time with improved grammar and spelling. If you get a message alleging to be from the "mcmaster.ca" or "math.mcmaster.ca" Support Team saying that you have a virus and should open an attachment, please don't open it; the message is from neither UTS nor me and the attachment is a trojan of the sort described here.
Continue reading Virus/Trojan Making the Rounds.

3:30 PM

Adobe Reader 7 & kprinter

Adobe Reader 7 isn't interacting properly with kprinter. Using 'kprinter -c' solves the problem.

12:26 PM

Adobe Reader 7 Now Default

Given occaisional problems people have had with Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 on the msprime workstations, that version has been removed. Adobe Reader 7 is now the default version and should work via the command 'acroread', when double-clicking on files and via Mozilla and Firefox.

11:31 AM

April 22, 2005

Adobe Reader 7.0 Available

Adobe Reader 7.0 has been installed on the msprime stations. For now, the previous version of Adobe Reader (acroread 5) will remain the default. Once more testing has been done and we're happy that the new version integrates well with other applications, I will make 7.0 the default. You can run version 7 with this command:

acroread7

This Adobe's first offical linux release. A press release and the release notes have more information on new features.

2:34 PM

MacConnect Wireless in HH

UTS (formerly CIS) has installed MacConnect wireless in Hamilton Hall. Our temporary AirPort network (called 'math') will be removed on July 1st, 2005. Unlike the 'math' network, MacConnect is available to anyone with a MacId account (i.e. faculty, staff, graduate students and undergraduates); this is the same network which is available in the libraries, the student centre, and a growing list of other buildings.

I emphasize that you will need a MacId and VPN software to use the MacConnect wireless; see the MacConnect web site for more information.

The laptop/wireless section of the computing-resources web site will be updated in the next week or so.

2:24 PM

April 20, 2005

Koffice Installed

Koffice is now installed on the msprime workstations.

8:56 AM

April 13, 2005

OpenOffice Working

OpenOffice (Write, Calc, etc.) on the msprime workstations is working again.

2:59 PM

Mathserv Mail Problem Fixed

There were problems sending mail via mathserv late Tuesday night after the system logs filled the main disk with warning messages. The source of the problem is being investigated and we have a work-around in place at about 8:00 am Wednesday.

This is most likely fallout from the disk crash on Monday.

9:29 AM

April 12, 2005

OpenOffice Problem

OpenOffice isn't starting up on the msprime stations; I don't yet know why. A simple reinstallation is failing, too.

For now, please use gnumeric to open Excel or OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets.

Abiword will be available for Word and OpenOffice Write documents later on this evening.

2005-04-12 17:17:09
Abiword now available; type abiword from a command prompt or Alt-F2.

Continue reading OpenOffice Problem.

5:17 PM

Server Shutdown Cancelled

As the entry about the server crash implies, the announced server shutdown for Friday has been rendered moot and so is cancelled.

1:32 PM

Server Failure

Mathserv crashed at 1:02 pm on Monday, April 11th. It was back up again at 1:15 am with no data loss.

Most msprime workstations are picking up where they left off, though some may require a reboot.

The cause of the crash was a disk failure on one of the two RAID 5 arrays. "Aren't RAID 5 arrays supposed to be able to handle a single disk failure?" you ask. Yes; yes they are. But this is the second time since January that this server has failed to do so. I think that I have identified and solved a hardware problem that could have precipitated both this crash and the one in March.

Note that the department web site (including course pages) were only down from 1:00 pm to ca. 2:30 pm. I used the 2:00 am backup copy to bring the sites up on our backup server.

Plans were underway to reduce the likelihood of this sort of failure as well as the downtime should it happen anyhow; I am accelerating the project.

Continue reading Server Failure.

1:31 AM | 2 Comments

April 11, 2005

Planned Server Shutdown

In order to replace some faulty hardware, I will be shutting mathserv down on Friday morning at 7:30 am. It should be back up by 8:30 am.

12:45 PM

April 1, 2005

Improved Spam Filtering

SpamAssassin on mathserv has been ignoring messages flagged as not-spam by the campus level spam detector since the latter was implemented. Unfortunately, this has resulted in an increase in the number of spam messages reaching inboxes. SpamAssassin (actually, procmail) is now configured to ignore (actually, remove) the campus-level tags.
Continue reading Improved Spam Filtering.

4:36 PM

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