October 2006 Archives

The Lexmark C750 colour printer in HH-401 is working again. Recall that you must now connect via the departmental print server; instructions for Windows and OS X here.

R 2.3.1 was installed along side R 2.1 in August. The command R now runs the newer version.

Back in August, I introduced a way for you to help train SpamAssassin by setting aside spam that slips past the filter and lands in your inbox. After a particularly spammish yesterday, with twenty spam messages staring at me over my morning coffee, I found myself wondering if it's really worth the bother. Short answer: yes it is.

I've got details below, but to those who are going to get on with their lives at this point, I will just say please do file those messages into Spambox-learn - it makes a difference.

As announced via email and the Computing News site last week:

• the department will begin tracking printing and charging as per the printing guidelines methodically as for October 2006. (see annoucement)


• all access to the shared printers is now provided via a server, print.math.mcmaster.ca; if you maintain your own desktop or laptop system, you must remove any queues pointing directly to the network printers and add new queues. (see announcment)

The AIMS (HH-403) and Phimac (HH-402) printers were purchased using group funds and were intended for use by group members. We are requested by these groups to use those printers only if the primary shared printer, the HPLJ 4345 outside of HH-303, is out of service.

The HPLJ 4300 in HH-403 (the AIMS lab) has been the default printer for the unix workstations and servers for some time now. In order to avoid the incovenience of having jobs go to a room which is sometimes locked and to reduce traffic and paper mess in the AIM lab, the HPLJ 4345 outside of HH-303 is the default system printer as of 4:30 today.

If you have specified a default printer for your account (as described here), that setting will not be affected.

The Lexmark C750 colour printer in HH-401 is down with network problems.

As announced, mathserv was rebooted just after noon; total downtime was just under four minutes. I hope experience wasn't too traumatic for anyone; my apologies for the short notice.

We will not be allowing printing from the MacConnect network after the October 12th changes to printer access until some security issues can be resolved.

In order to print from a laptop on MacConnect:
* save your printout to a PostScript or PDF file
* transfer the file to mathserv or your workstation
* print using the lpr or kprinter commands; for example:
kprinter file.ps
lpr -P HH303-HPLJ4345 file.pdf

As announced earlier this year by the chair, the department is going to start enforcing the printing g0uidelines by billing for use above the threshold of 100 pp/yr for faculty and 100 pp/yr for graduate students and postdocs. See the printing guidelines for more information.

Starting Thursday, October 12th, you will not be able to print directly to the departmental printers from your laptop or desktop computer. Access to the printers is now provided by a print server.

I will be performing an emergency reboot on mathserv at 12:05 today. Web, email and workstation access will be interrupted for about ten minutes.

The msprime linux workstations will lock up when mathserv goes down but will respond again as soon as it is up; you do not need to reboot.

MATLAB 2006a is being replaced by MATLAB2006b on the servers and workstations. Version 2006b is primarily a bug-fix release and should have no effect on functionality.

Help now works in Maple 9.

Note that Maple 10 will not be available on graduate-student, post-doc or visitor workstations for licensing reasons; Maple 10 is, however. available on the compute servers.

When running MATLAB 2006 on a server(e.g. bayes, bluespruce), manipulating plots may cause a linux workstation to crash. Run this command at the start of a session or .m file in order to avoid the problem:
opengl software

This does not appear to be a problem when displaying back to OS X systems nor when running MATLAB 2006 locally.