March 2008 Archives

In addition to the system-wide delivery delays this morning, some people (maybe a dozen) will have seen other odd mail behaviour. The problems were tracked back to two sources which were corrected at ca. 10:30 am and 2:30 pm. No inbound mail appears to have been permanently affected and stalled outbound mail should be flowing again.

Incoming messages were held for ca. 30 minutes before being delivered for much of Friday morning due to an experiment with greylisting (a method of blocking spam which relies on spam programs giving up on delivery much more quickly than real mail programs). We have discontinued that experiment for now.

I've made a number of announcements on the Computing News blog related the printing. Most importantly: the colour printer in HH-401 is now a black-and-white printer; there is now a laser printer in the HH-105 graduate-student room. See below for details and related announcements.

If you are expecting a visitor, you can arrange network access in advance so that they can use their laptops as soon as they arrive. Keep in mind that I can provide network access in Hamilton Hall quickly and easily; network access for other parts of campus takes a day or so. More information about network and printer access for visitors can be found here:
http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/computing/laptops/?page=visitors

The Lexmark C750 in HH-401 is now available via the queue names HH401-LMC750 and lp6 (the latter replacing the irregular c750).

There is now an HPLJ 4300 in HH-105; queue names are HH105-HPLJ4300 and lp7. I have made this the default queue for workstations in HH-105.

There are instructions for printing to this printer from laptops.

Don't forget that printing isn't free.

The HH-401 Lexmark printer is now a regular (if slowish) black-and-white laser printer; HH-401 residents may feel free to use it instead of the HH-303 printer without worrying about the relative cost.

The Lexmark C750 Colour Laser Printer in HH-401 will no longer print in colour but only in black and white. The colour cartridges for the C750 are very expensive and cost of replacing the two empty ones approaches the cost of a new colour laser printer. The department administration has decided that the cost (of refill or replacement) cannot be justified.

The printer will remain in HH-401 and will operate as a regular black-and-white printer subject to the same per-page charges as the other shared printers.

I've observed a few problems to paper and the printers lately. Please note:

The scanning function on the HH-303 HPLJ 4345mfp was disabled as a side effect of the printer service this morning. It's re-enabled as of 1:45 this afternoon.

The HH-303 printer has been repaired and the queue is flowing again.

The HPLJ 4345mfp outside of HH-303 started crashing on Tuesday afternoon. We are expecting a technician on Wednesday morning.

It's the start of thesis-printing season; here are some things to keep in mind.

You can force single-sided printing by turning off "duplex"; see this FAQ entry.

Acrobat Reader is your best bet for printing PDF files of your thesis; right-click and choose "Acrobat Reader"or "acroread"

Keep in mind the squaring problem when printing multiple copies; your best option is to print one copy and photocopy the rest.

The colour printer is not printing colour and probably won't again until it is replaced (in late March or early April).

Acrobat Reader 8 was installed recently but under some circumstances, your computer will still pick up version 7; you can force the choice of version 8.

If you want a copies of thesis on special paper, it is simpler to take a regular printout and your special paper to a photocopier than to put your paper into the printer and hope no-one else prints before you do.