December 2006 Archives

In earlier announcements, I mistakenly advertised the free printing limit for faculty as 100 pages per month; that should be 100 pages per year as per the chair's message to the department in the Summer.

The printing guidelines page has been corrected to match the text in the quoted letter from the chair.

I found out this morning that Physical Plant has will be shutting off the air conditioning in the Hamilton Hall server room from 7:30 am to 11:00 am on Thursday. It may be necessary to shut down bayes, freesurface, bluespruce and space in order to prevent overheating.

Large parts of the Internet are inaccessible this afternoon due to problems external to the campus networks; there is nothing we can do but sit back and wait.

UTS advises that some older versions of Sophos antivirus have been found to have a vulnerability:
http://www.frsirt.com/english/advisories/2006/4919

Check to see which version you have and download any necessary updates from UTS.

Mathserv crashed and was down for six minutes at ca. 9:30 this morning. This does not appear to be related to the problem on Wednesday evening, which was a network and I/O strain which left mathserv up but all but almost unresponsive.

Mathserv was extrememly slow between 7:00 pm and 11:00 pm on Wednesday evening, often to the point of being unresponsive; this affected email, web and msprime workstation services. I rebooted mathserv at 11:00 in order to let it shake itself out after spending an hour isolating the source of the problem (during which hour mathserv was sometimes just fine and sometimes miserably slow).

For those who are interested: mathserv was swamped by a huge file transfer. It should not have reacted quite so badly as it did, so I'll be investigating further.

Microsoft has warned of two vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Word in the past week. The first (announced December 5th) vulnerability affects both Windows and Mac OS X versions; the second (announced December 10th) affects only Windows versions. The Register has a nice summary.

I've mentioned the spike in spam that we've seen on mathserv in the past few months before. You may take some consolation in knowing that it's not just us. This New York Times article notes that spam volume has doubled since last year and that 90% of all email on the Internet is now spam.

I really, really recommend turning spam filtering on for your account if you have not already done so.

Mathserv and the msprime workstations were very slow for about ten minutes at around 12:30 pm today due to a massive network load. Email and web access will have been intermittend during this period. Everything should be back to normal as of 12:35.