January 2006 Archives

The Lexmark C750 is working again, now that the melted overhead-transparency has been pried off of the fuser at the cost of an hour of a technician's time. We're lucky that the fragments didn't work themselves into the mechanical parts and cause damage.

Do make sure that you are using proper type of acetate sheets - the main office can supply you with the right kind.

I was able to keep all machines but mathserv2 (the fail-over server) running through this morning's ventillation shutdown since the AC was off only for part of the announced period.

Mathserv was unavailable via ssh for between 8:30 and 9:00; other services (web, mail, workstation) were unaffected and this was not related to the ventillation shutdown.

The C750 in HH-401 is not feeling well. Paper comes out wrinkled; transparencies get stuck and are rendered smeary; it sometimes goes "crunk-crunk-crunk." I'm guessing that the wrong kind of transparency went through at some point and that the works are gummed up.

It's unplugged and should remain so. We're going to have a service technician out shortly.

Physical Plant has announced that they will be shutting off the ventillation systems in Hamilton from 6:00 am to 8:00 am on Tuesday (Janurary 31st). I will be shutting down the following systems in the server room before 6:00 am in order to avoid overheating:
* mathserv2
* bluespruce
* space

I will shut down the following systems only if the room becomes too hot:
* bayes
* freesurface
* modelmath
* redpine

The changes to the 'math' wireless network announced last week have been implemented. The signal is now concentrated at the Western end of the building and the SSID (network name) is no longer being broadcast. If your laptop doesn't connect automatically (OS X laptops should continue to do so), enter the SSID 'math' manually to connect.

The changes to the 'math' wireless network announced last week have been implemented. The signal is now concentrated at the Western end of the building and the SSID is no longer being broadcast. If your laptop doesn't connect automatically (OS X laptops should continue to do so), enter the SSID (network name) 'math' manually to connect.

Following a delay of several months past the announced removal date, I will be starting what you might call the deprecation of the 'math' wireless network.

The 'math' network has been rendered more or less redundant by the MacConnect network and UTS has asked that remove the temporary network in order to reduce interference.

Intel has announced that they will release (Intel) OS X versions of their c++ and Fortran 95 compilers and the Math Kernel Library. No release date was announced.

http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/227389.htm

The machines were turned back on at ca. 10:30 am when the room had cooled enough to take the extra systems.

Now I'm told that the ventillation will go down tomorrow am from ca. 5 - 7. The machines can easily overheat - which could result in file-system damage, even hardware damage - before two hours without ventillation. I'm going going to shut down everything but mathserv, bayes and freesurface this time. Redpine, spruce, modelmath and mathserv2 will shutdown at ca. 4:00 am.

All of the systems shutdown on Saturday are still turned off as the air conditioning is not yet back on. I have contacted Physical Plant.

Physical Plant will be shutting down the ventilation system in Hamilton Hall on Saturday, January 7th, which means that there will be no cooling in the server room. In order to prevent overheating, I will be shutting down all systems except for mathserv on Friday evening; the systems will be restarted on Monday morning. There will be no interruption to web, mail or workstation service.

Mathserv was rebooted half an hour later than announced; the reboot corrected a memory problem on the server. The reboot was delayed in order to allow the nightly backup to finish.

I have updated the system and application software on the msprime systems in Hamilton Hall to the latest releases for Mandrake 10.1; I recommend restarting your computer when convenient. These updates are mostly bug fixes and security patches.

Updatee systems and applications include mozilla, X11, vi and xine.