April 2007 Archives

The web mail interface at http://mail.math.mcmaster.ca has been upgraded to a newer version.

The most signifgant change is that deleted messages, sent messages and draft messages are now stored in the folders Trash, Sent and Drafts in your standard mail directory, where they will be visible to other mail applications such as pine, Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird.

The other major change is that all mail folders are now listed on the left by default, so you don't have to subscribe to them.

Descriptive Name			Short Name
BSBB123-HPLJ4100			lp1
HH214-HPLJ4050				lp4      
HH303-HPLJ4345				lp3
HH401-LMC750				lmc750
HH402-HPLJ2300				lp5
HH403-HPLJ4300				lp2

The following was emailed to the entire department.

[To: All Math & Stats faculty, staff, graduate students, visitors]

Contents
HH-303 Printer Replaced
Simplification of Print Queues
Banner Pages - Off for a While
Web Interruptions
Spam-Filter Accuracy Down

Some parts of the departmental web site will be unavailable for up to a minute at a time now and again on Friday and Monday while I sort out a database problem on the server. The parts affected will be those which draw from the departmental database: the directory of department members, course listings and seminar notices, primarily.

Some people like the banner pages; some people think they're a waste of paper. The jury is still out. But they are going to be turned off for a while until I can sort out a technical problem.

The HPLJ 4345 printer/scanner outside of HH-303 has been replaced by the vendor; the queues on the server have been renabled and it is ready for use.

The HH-303 printer is no longer unstable and crashing. It is now stably dead. Until the replacement comes, use the HH-403 or HH-214 printers.

In order to simplify use (and management) of the printers, I will be reducing the number of queue names for each printer to two: lpx and ROOM-MODEL. This will, for the most part, only affect those who print from linux workstations and the servers.

For example, one can print to the printer outside of HH-303 using any of the following queue names: HH303-HPLJ4345, hh303lj4345, lp3, lj3. Once I have made the changes, there will be two queues: HH303-HPLJ4345 and lp3.

The changes will take effect on Monday, April 16th.

Based on the increased amount of spam in my own inbox and a cursory examination of a few other inboxes, it appears that the new spamassassin setup needs tuning. You should see some improvement in the next week or so.

The bad news: the HH-303 printer is crashing again - replacing the formatter (the motherboard, more or less) last week had little effect on the stability.

The good news: the vendor is going to replace the printer - this week sometime, I'm told.

I rebooted mathserv at 4:10 - it was down back up three minutes later. Sorry for the short notice - a (mild) emergency related to last week's upgrades.

Math & Stats webmail is once again available at mail.math.mcmaster.ca.

The webmail interface will be upgraded in the second or third week of april. You can expect that this interface will be occasionally unavailable.

There were some expected and some unexpected (as one might expect) problems in the wake of the Wednesday-evening upgrade of the server. Some things have not been brought up or are broken on the new server are.

Web mail
The web interface at http://mail.math.mcmaster.ca is not working. I plan to upgrade from SquirellMail to either a slicker application or at least a new version of the same software. Use a mail client or pine for the nonce.

Security Certificate
SSL (https) connections are giving a warning as I haven't updated the security certificates yet.

The linux systems are now printing more than just banner pages - whole jobs, in fact. You no longer need to print by way of mathserv. Thanks for your patience - I realize that some of you had urgent need of printouts (which is, of course, almost always the case for someone).

And the HH-303 printer, which was repaired yesterday, has now been reconfigured and prints two-sided by default again.

The new mathserv is now in place. We're working out some kinks, as many have noticed. Here's the good news:

The HH-303 printer has had a new motherboard installed and it seems OK so far. I haven't finished reconfiguring it, but it does print and send scans over email.

The updated server came on-line last night at 9pm. Some things that worked well during testing didn't work so well in production - printing is the biggest outstanding problem. Details follow; please email sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca if you encounter any other problems.

Web-Server and Database
There were problems with the conversion to the new version of the database server - the people and course pages didn't display details in the pop-ups correctly. This is fixed as of 11am today.

Email
Spamassassin was not working for ca. one hour; you may see a rash of spam from late last night in your mailbox.

Printing from Linux Workstations
Printing works fine from mathserv and from Windows and OS X desktops and laptops (with a few exceptions which I cannot yet characterize). Linux workstations are only printing banner pages. Until we sort this out, you can print as follows:

As mentioned last week*, mathserv will be taken down at 4pm this afternoon. Expect mail, web, printer and workstation access to be unavailable for some three or four hours. That said, I will be bringing individual services back on line as soon as possible, so some things may be up before others.

There should be very little apparent down-time for the web server since I will be bringing up www.math.mcmaster.ca on the backup server at 2pm. Changes made to any sites after ca. 1:30 pm will not be reflected until later on this evening.

* On this blog, via email and on the mathserv message-of-the-day.