Recently in Computing Updates Category

The server which failed is back up as of 8:00 AM today. No files were lost. Queued mail for people with usernames m - z is now flowing, although filtering and delivery of the thousands of queued messages (mostly spam, of course) may take hour or so.

The source problem will not be corrected until after the long weekend and so the server must be considered unstable for the next few days.

[The following was sent to all departmental faculty, staff, graduate students and visitors]

AIMS Lab (HH-403) Printer Working

The AIMS-printer in HH-403 is working again after a last-ditch effort involving buggy replacement parts from another dead system. I'm cautiously optimistic, but will be keeping my eye out for problems. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

I have made this printer the default for the HH-403 workstations.

Dead Printers - Accepting Reality

After extended health problems and then months of near death gathering dust, the printers in HH-402 and HH-105 are being declared officially dead. I've removed the queues from the workstations and servers. The default printer for the HH-402 systems in now the HH-303 HPLJ 4345.

There is a list of the current printers on the Printer page on the Computing Resources site.

Spam Spike

A number of us have seem a dramatic spike in the amount of spam in our inboxes over the past two days - this is a result not so much of more spam hitting the server but rather of more of the spam making it past the UTS and RHPCS filters. We are looking into the problem.

It would be helpful if you could file the missed spam into the folder rhpcs/spam-missed rather than deleting it.

Automatic Mail Trash Cleanup

We currently have about 6 Gb of deleted mail stored on mathserv (that's about 6% of all mail storage). The indexing and updating of the Trash/Deleted folders is an unnecessary drain on the server. Starting next Thursday, Trash/Deleted folders greater than 10 Mb will be removed each week. You will be notified two days before if your Trash/Deleted folder is slated for purging.

We did, as expected, lose power to the server room this afternoon at ca. 4:30. After 15 min. our battery backup was drained and I had to shut the servers down. Web and email are back up as of 4:55. Workstation access is failing for as-yet unknown reasons. I am investigating.

A note about the following updates were emailed to all department members 2009/02/10 at 12:30 pm: Server Reboot this Afternoon; Downtime for Upgrades During Reading Week; Server Crash Tuesday Morning; Bluespruce More than Down.

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