May 2006 Archives

Maple 10 is now available on bluespruce, bayes and freesurface. Use the commands xmaple10 or maple10; maple and xmaple will continue to start Maple 9 until June 15th.

Maple 10 will not be available on the msprime workstations until some problems to do with licensing costs are resolved.

Physical Plant will test the emergency power in Hamilton Hall at 7:30 am on Wednesday, June 7th. There is a small chance that workstations will lose power; keep this in mind if you plan to have any long-running jobs. The servers have battery backup and will not be affected.

I end up mentioning the screen utility a few times each month, so I'm putting mention of it here, even though it's hardly computing news. screen is an invaluable but under-used utility. Very simply, it allows you to have detachable shell: you can work in the shell, close it down, and pick it up again with everything inside still running. For example:

From your office:

ssh bayes
screen -a
R
<crtl>-a d
logout

From home:

ssh mathserv
ssh bayes
screen -r

... and there you are back at the R prompt. If you had set an R command running, it will have continued running in the background.

Mathserv suffered a crash related to a networking overflow on Wednesday at 9:32 pm. It was brought back up by another analyst at 9:30 am this morning (I am away this week). This is the second such failure on campus in a week; foul play is a technical possibility and we are investigating.

All mail was queued for delivery once mathserv recovered. msprime workstations should not need to be rebooted. There is no evidence of data loss.

UTS has arranged to keep the network in Hamilton Hall up this Sunday. We will not lose Internet access to and from HH; I won't be moving the web sites to the backup system in ABB; email will not be interrupted.

The licensing problem has been sorted and S-Plus 6.2 is now available on bayes again. S-Plus 7.0 is now installed, too.

To run version 6.2:
splus6

To run version 7.0:
splus7

The command splus will continue to run version 6.2 until the end of May, 2006; as of June 1st, it will instead run version 7.0