April 2009 Archives

Firefox has been updated again due to some stability problems in the previous release. Fingers crossed.

There has been at least one recent case of the UTS mail gateway (through which much mail bound for mathserv also travels) flagging scanned documents sent from the HH-303 printer/scanner as spam - check your spam folder if a document doesn't arrive immediately.

Firefox on the ms workstations has been updated 3.0.9; I hope that this will fix some stability issues with 3.0.8.

The ms workstations became very slow for ten minutes at around 4 pm Friday - that was me running some updates which hammered the server harder than expected.

A technician found the problem with the HH-303 printer/scanner and corrected it - it seems to be scanning just fine now.

The scanner logic board in the HH-303 printer was replaced today to no avail - scanning mostly doesn't work and printing sometimes stops. I new main controller board is now on order and should arrive in a few days.

Sigh ...

The scanner on the HH-303 printer is still wonky and stops working after x attempts, where 0 >= x <= 10. A new logic board has been ordered and will arrive in a few days.

The scanner has been poked and prodded by a technician and I have upgraded the firmware and it seems to be OK, except for the occasional message about "removing paper from the glass"; opening and closing the scanner lid seems to fix that. Send us email if you run into any problems with it, please.

Firefox on the ms workstations has been upgraded to version 3.0.8 and this version (not version 2) is now the default. Use the command "firefox2" if you want to run the old version. Note that this version does not have the problem with the new Hotmail that early releases of Firefox 3 did.

Betimes, the check-mail process started by a mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) doesn't close down properly. These processes take up memory and resources and interfere with new connections. I've now got the server periodically killing mail processes more than one hour old. The good news is that this clears up some bad behaviour with Apple Mail; the bad news is that this _might_ result in deleted mail reappearing.

Let me know if you start to notice any behaviour like this.

Some of you will have noticed that your workstations stopped responding for ten to twenty seconds a couple of times at 11:45 am today - that was a result of me fixing a server problem.

I'm sure that many of you are seeing a spam spike in the past two weeks. This is due to a increase in the amount of spam being sent, a change in some of the spam, and my removing some filter tweaks in order to rationalize them. I'll be looking at this some time this week.

The scanner is mostly scanning, but may ask you to "check the scanner bed"; lifting the lid once or twice seems to make it happy.

The printer is mostly printing, but is still getting stuck at "Cancelling job" for reasons I've not yet determined; the only solution is to turn it off and back on at that point.

I am going to follow up with the tech-support people next week.

The HH-303 printer has new guts and prints cleanly again. And the scanner now scans again. And because the scanner scans, the printer no longer freezes. Which doesn't really makes sense, so I'll be keeping an eye on it. But I'm brimming with hope.

Each time the printer was frozen (for minutes or hours) yesterday and today, a bunch of print jobs backed up in the queue and then came flowing out when it was rebooted. So you may find some apparently lost printouts waiting for you in the racks.

The scanner is once again not scanning; a technician should be here today. Printing seems a bit wonky too, with some jobs getting list when the scanner seizes.