Recently in General Annoucements Category

On October 22nd, there will be a computer/electronics recycling tent set up outside the student centre run by the Office of Sustainability, University Technology Services and Facility Services. You can take old stuff there and it will either be recycled, safely disposed of or targeted for re-use. UTS staff will be on hand to wipe hard drives clean.

The full announcement follow ...

There will be a ten-minute power outage in BSB and HH at 5:30 am on Tuesday, June 23rd. The servers will stay up but workstations will lose power. I suggest you power off self-administered systems on Monday evening; we will take care of linux and OS X shutdowns for systems we manage.

I will be out of the office from Tuesday June 9th through Tuesday June 16th. Email sent to sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca will be monitored by other RHPCS analysts while I am away.

There will be a power outage of about 10 minutes in HH and BSB at 5:30 am on Tuesday, May 12th. The mail/web/file server and network will not be affected, nor will bayes. I recommend turning off office Windows or Macintosh computers; I will take care of linux workstations.

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.

There was a power failure (which affected all of West Hamilton and beyond) on Sunday afternoon. The web/email/file servers and compute servers on backup power were not affected, but some workstations will need to be started or rebooted.

We will be keeping backups of changed/deleted files for only ten days instead of the usual two weeks (four weeks in the case of mathserv) for the next few days due to a disk-array problem on our backup server.

The file-server problem is corrected as of 10:15 am and all services are operational again.
The mail filters were not operating properly for many people from midnight to 10am today, so you find a strong flavour of spam in your inbox (200+ messages in under 12 hours, in my case).

Email, login and workstation services are disabled while we work on a problem with the file server disk arrays. Most web sites are still up, though some personal sites are inaccessible.

The main file server was spinning its wheels ferociously from ca. midnight to 9:15 am today. And as soon as it was sorted out, the main mail/web server went a little nuts until it was rebooted. As of 9:50 am, everything seems OK. We are investigating.

I brought the compute servers back on line this morning. Workstations seem to be OK, but they are running without local scratch space over the holidays (so that disks errors from unexpected power loss doesn't prevent booting); this would reduce workstation responsiveness under normal conditions, but should not when so few systems are in use.

Since the university is closed, I will be leaving shortly. I will be available via email much of the day, though.

Starting Monday, December 22nd, there will be reduced computer support from RHPCS. From Christmas through New Year, the university is closed and there will be no support. Though if there is a dire problem and you send email to sysadmin@rhpcs.mcamster.ca, I don't promise that someone won't respond.

The standard ms workstations are in fact rebooting when given the shutdown signal. In order to shut your system down, use the "turn off computer" option, wait until you see the Dell logo or the line "Sending kill signal to all processes" and then press the power button.

Access to home directories via Windows File Sharing (SMB) was not working properly following last week's server changes but is now fixed. But note that users pre-Leopard versions of OS X will need to use mathserv2 instead of mathserv.
See the FAQ for more information.

About half of the linux workstations were unable to boot today due to errors on the hard drives resulting from the power failure yesterday. I implemented a workaround and all systems were booting by noon today. We are looking into a cleaner solution.

.... please have a look at the So Long, Farewell... page on the Computing Resources site.

Humanities Media & Computing is selling off old computer and audio/visual equipment from June 11th to 13th. Note that only departments, faculty and staff are eligible purchasers.

A reminder that the power in HH will be out on Sunday from 6:00 pm until 3:00 am. All servers will be down for that period and email and the web sites will be inaccessible. The linux workstations will also be down. I will power the servers off at 5:00 pm on Sunday and bring them back up at 8:30 am on Monday.

Facilities Services announced Monday that power to HH will be out from 5:00 am to 8:00 am this Thursday. We don't have the battery capacity to keep the servers running for three hours, so I will schedule a 4:00 am shutdown of all servers; I will restart them at ca. 8:30 am.

Cooling is shut off in Hamilton Hall today and the server room overheated despite the temporary A/C unit installed by Facility Services. The main server was down for ca. 30 minutes but is back up and should stay up. All other servers (bayes, bluespruce, etc.) will remain off until the cooling systems are turned back on.

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

1. See the "I'm new" page for a quick summary of the computers, software, printers, email and web services available to you.
2. Spam filtering is enabled for all new accounts.
3. You should not turn off your linux workstation when you leave; it needs to be on for overnight updates and backups.

Ken Moyle will not be out of the office from June 18 - 22. Send questions or requests to sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca. For an urgent request or if the email is unavailable, contact the staff in the main office as they have the emergency contact information.

Ken Moyle will be away from May 14th to May 18th. Email sent to sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca will be monitored by other RHPCS analysts.

The following was emailed to the entire department.

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

Read the first item if nothing else - there's downtime next week. The last item, too - there's a nice picture of a red-tailed hawk.

Contents:
Downtime Evening of Wed. April 4th
HH-303 Printouts - Including Exams - in 218
HH-303 Printer Problems - Worse
Nicer Email Address
Spam Wave
Nature Red in Tail and Claw

[This isn't "computing news", of course, but a few people have asked if anyone got photos.]

A good deal of the department was briefly transfixed with the sight of a large red-tailed hawk having a bit of breakfast on the lawn. Ilona Kowalik took a picture before it got shy and flew off (not for the squeamish).

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.

I and several T13-109 residents were told that T13 would lose power this weekend "due to near-by demolition work." Given that there isn't any demolition work going on near T13, it is not terribly surprising that the announcement was in error.

The demolition this weekend is over near the athletics complex, so I would guess that T28 and T29 are the buildings which will lose power.

On a related note, there was an unscheduled power outage in T13 last weekend.

Your mathserv account will be left open for one year after your departure date (as we have it on record from the main office). This means that for one year, your web site will remain up, your email will remain accessible and you will have access to the systems. You should make sure to copy any files which you wish to keep before the year is out.

For more information, see Computer Accounts and Access on the department Computing Resources site.

Physical Plant will test the emergency power in Hamilton Hall at 7:30 am on Wednesday, June 7th. There is a small chance that workstations will lose power; keep this in mind if you plan to have any long-running jobs. The servers have battery backup and will not be affected.

Ken Moyle will be out of the office from December 22nd through January 1st. Contact sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca with any questions or requests.

The university is closed over the Christmas break (December 24th through Janurary 1st) and there will be no support for the research systems during that period.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, an Agreeable Anythingelse and a Happy New Year to all.