News

On the 20th of May 2025 we are enabling 2FA (second-factor-authentication) on the C&CZ services: DIY, Roundcube and SSH on the login servers. In this article you can find information on this roll-out and how to activate 2Fa on your Science account. As mentioned in an earlier news item, we’ve finished the tests and reached the following conclusions: Anyone with a Science account can enable 2FA in DIY using this procedure. For about 6 weeks you can enable 2FA in DIY. You must have activated 2FA by the 20th of May 2025 if you want to use: DIY, Roundcube or SSH on the login servers. ...

After our previous news message concerning the new implementation of DIY, we are now ready to announce: The new DIY will go live on Thursday the 20th of March. The previous DIY server will be kept running on https://prev.dhz.science.ru.nl. If there is are things that work in the old one, but not in the new one, please let us know. The old DIY will be turned off on the first the 11th of April 2025.

We have updated the authentication process for login servers after a succesful test we announced in CPK#1383. As of now, your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on lilo is ignored!, instead you can send us your public ssh key (contents of the .pub file) to keep for your account. This change is designed to prevent bad actors from easily gaining persistent access. For convenience we have added the keys we have found in homedirectories that were added or modified after we restricted access to lilo, if your key is from before December 9th, you will need to send the public key to us. ...

At the end of last year we’ve promised an update on how we are planning to make access to our services more secure. In this post we expand on those plans. In short: we are going to deploy 2FA on Science accounts and make it mandatory for services that are reachable from the internet. How this all works from an organizational standpoint is, at this point, not complete clear yet. Do we need a “in-person” vetting procedure? Or do we allow users to enable this themselves in DIY? Ideas on this will surface after the test period. ...

A new version of Mathematica (14.2.0) 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 introduces a powerful tool in Tabular, which provides a very streamlined and efficient way to handle tables of data laid out in rows and columns, with hundreds of other functions enhanced to make use of its special features. Additional new functions and improvements have been added to enhance neural nets and LLMs, work with game theory, improve GPU computation, and expand images and videos.”

Due to a phishing attack targeting science accounts, and the subsequent abuse of RU mail servers to sent out spam and phishing from valid science e-mail accounts, we were forced to employ a set of defensive measure as evident from cpk/1381, cpk/1382, cpk/1381. To prevent further abuse (and disruption) caused by compromised accounts, we have had to temporarily restrict access to some science services. These services include: Anything related to e-mail: Roundcube, authenticated SMTP, IMAP, and POP3. SSH access to the LILOs (see cpk/1383 for a workaround). DIY as well as the new replacement. Email services are now being reopened on a per science account basis. A set of approximately 1,000 accounts has regained normal access. To request access, please contact us. ...

C&CZ has been working to replace the current DIY website to make it easier to add new functionality to it. This work included a rewrite of the website and a large part of our tooling to the Go language. Taking the Dutch term for DIY (Doe Het Zelf - DHZ) prefixing it with Go, this resulted in the codename “godzilla”. A pre-release of this new website is running on https://godzilla.science.ru.nl. Note this site is fully functional (modulo bugs), so any changes made there are really being made to your science account. Eventually this version will run on https://diy.science.ru.nl. ...

The Science VPNsec and OpenVPN service will be discontinued as of 2024-12-01 (1 Dec 2024) 2024-11-26. To ensure continued secure access to our network, we recommend transitioning to eduVPN, our officially supported VPN service. This was first announced in February 2024. If you have any questions or require assistance, feel free to contact us.

A new version of Mathematica (14.1.0) 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 14.1 introduces the unified Wolfram application and expands Wolfram Language by offering new tools for working with neural nets and LLMs, for finding differences in content, for working with images and videos, and for exploring scientific evaluations through biomolecules, astrophysics and more”

Recently, the Radboud news reported that students can have small repairs to their laptops done in the RUpair-shop without any labor time being charged. For students and employees of FNWI, the C&CZ helpdesk provides a similar service. Stefan Reijgwart and Dominic van den Broek in particular are specialists in repairing laptops, among other things.