C&CZ

For years now Gitlab has bundled Mattermost as an integrated component for online chats, however this situation is changing, and Mattermost has announced that it is dropping support for single-sign-on (SSO). This is turn makes the integration with Gitlab unusable, thus Gitlab is now pondering dropping support altogether. This is unfortunate timing as we are working on tighter integration between science groups and Mattermost channels. Provisional Plan So what are we going to do about this? For chat, we have been looking at Zulip for a while now. This a stand alone, 100% open source chat server that works just like Mattermost. It’s supports OpenID, so we can hook up to diy for SSO. ...

Over the years we’ve had some requests to run an Overleaf instance for science users. To integrate this well in our environment we would need the enterprise version, which costs about € 8,- per user per month. This is prohibitive expensive for us to run, because we would need to pay for all science users, so we will not be pursuing setting up Overleaf any further in the science domain. There are alternatives for this setup, they may or may not work for your use case: ...

The latest version of Matlab, R2025b, is available. The software and license codes are directly available for Science accounts and can be requested by other entitled users by sending mail to the helpdesk. The software can also be found on the install-share. All C&CZ-managed Linux machines have this version installed, the older version (/opt/matlab-R2025a/bin/matlab) will be available temporarily. The C&CZ-managed Windows machines will not receive a new version during the semester to prevent problems with version dependencies in current lectures. ...

August 5th we had a cluster maintenance day, the next cluster maintenance window will be on February 6th 2026. We will do updates to packages and reboot the nodes. We plan to do this on all cnXXX nodes, mlpXX and comaXX nodes. We will not upgrade to a new version of ubuntu on this day, if you want your clusternodes to be upgraded, please arrange this seperately with us.

We have been working on replacing the old home servers home1 and home2 for some time now and a lot of our users have already been moved to the new home servers, home4, home5 and home6. If you login to dhz.science.ru.nl you can find your home volume path, for moved users this will look like \\306a2a9df234234123123523c22054dfaf9.home.science.ru.nl\loginname This path will not change in the future when we have to replace the home servers again. The first part is an alias for one of the new home servers. Every login will have an unique alias for its home path server. ...

The latest version of Matlab, R2025a, is available. The software and license codes are directly available for Science accounts and can be requested by other entitled users by sending mail to the helpdesk. The software can also be found on the install-share. All C&CZ-managed Linux machines have this version installed, the older version (/opt/matlab-R2024b/bin/matlab) will be available temporarily. The C&CZ-managed Windows machines will not receive a new version during the semester to prevent problems with version dependencies in current lectures. ...

As most Science users have enabled their two-factor authentication, we are now going to restrict DIY functionality for accounts without a second factor. If you have not enabled a second factor, you can: Login into DIY Set a password Enable your second factor All other functionally is disabled and will lead to an ‘Insufficient access’ error. In subsequent versions of the DIY software we will (further) hide actions and listing that you will not be able to use. ...

Lilo7 was running ubuntu 20.04 LTS (LTS=Long term support). Since the LTS support period has ended for ubuntu 20.04, we have turned off lilo7 on June 2nd, because there are no (free) security updates anymore for this OS release. We will repurpose the hardware for other tasks for the faculty. We have a new lilo9 with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. We will make this the new lilo on August 1st 2025. Lilo9 will remain available until end of May 2029. ...

Update 2025-05-20 This has been activated around 11 ‘o clock. On May the 20th we have enabled mandatory multifactor authentication for the following services: DIY web site. Roundcube, for reading mail. SSH from the internet to public servers, like the lilos. Below you can read how you can log in for each service. DIY Enter your Science login name, your password and the TOTP code from your authenticator app. If you have configured a Yubi key with us, you can also use the Yubi key’s OTP. ...

A new version of Mathematica (14.2.1) has been installed on all C&CZ managed Linux systems, older versions can still be found in /vol/mathematica. When connected wired or wireless on campus or through VPN, the software for Windows, Linux and macOS can be found on the C&CZ Install disc. During the installation you must specify: License server: mathematica.science.ru.nl License: L4601-6478 According to the Mathematica Quick Revision History: “Version 14.2.1 includes critical updates for Chatbook and code captions along with other bug fixes and stability improvements.” ...