June 2006 Archives

I and several T13-109 residents were told that T13 would lose power this weekend "due to near-by demolition work." Given that there isn't any demolition work going on near T13, it is not terribly surprising that the announcement was in error.

The demolition this weekend is over near the athletics complex, so I would guess that T28 and T29 are the buildings which will lose power.

On a related note, there was an unscheduled power outage in T13 last weekend.

Spam filtering is working again.

Recall that spam filtering is not automatic; you need to activate it for your account. In brief: just put these lines into the file .procmailrc in your home directory:

### spam assassin
SPAMTO=Spambox # keep in Spambox
#SPAMTO=/dev/null # remove leadng # to discard
INCLUDERC=/usr/local/etc/procmail/spam
### end spam assassin

More information here.

Your mathserv account will be left open for one year after your departure date (as we have it on record from the main office). This means that for one year, your web site will remain up, your email will remain accessible and you will have access to the systems. You should make sure to copy any files which you wish to keep before the year is out.

For more information, see Computer Accounts and Access on the department Computing Resources site.

OpenOffice was not working on a few of the msprime workstations late last week; it is working again. Please send email if you are still having problems.

Contrary to my message from the weekend, spam filtering is not working right now; this appears to be related to the mathserv network failure on the weekend. I am working on the problem.

Spam was not working between yesterday's reboot and 12:15 pm today. SpamAssassin has been restarted and spam is now being filtered (for those who have enabled filtering, that is).

Mathserv network services failed Saturday at ca. 3:30 am; I rebooted the system at 7:45 pm and all services were back up shortly thereafter. I will look into the reasons for the failure on Monday.

Note that mathserv did not actually crash so there was no data loss. Any mail sent to math accounts will have been queued and should have been delivered by now.

Bayes is now running Mandriva 2006.0. All software installed under the previous OS has been carried forward and should work as before. Please email sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca if you encounter any problems.

MATLAB Release 2006a (version 7.2.0.294) has been installed on the shared compute servers and the network workstations in Hamilton Hall and T13-109; use the command matlab2006a to run this version. Please let me know if you encounter anything weird. I plan to make the version the default (currently R14SP3) come August.

See the Release Notes for more information.

The bayes upgraded scheduled for Monday June 12th has been resecheduled for the afternoon of Thursday June 15th.

The latest version of Firefox and Thunderbird have been installed on the msprime and T13-109 workstations. There are minor updates featuring security and stability patches; you may see an upgrade notice the next time you run the applications.

Printing will not be available from mathserv over the weekend; use another server (e.g. bluespruce) if you need to print.

Update: printing restored Friday at 6:15 pm.

The MATLAB license servers are not allowing new MATLAB sessions due to an invalid license file supplied to us for a new toolbox today. We are working on it.

Update: working again as of 16:40.

I plan to take bayes off line for the afternoon of Monday, June 12th in order to upgrade the operating system. Please email me at sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca if this will be a particularly bad time for you.