In the process of handling the Log4Shell vulnerability, it was decided to use the Intrusion Protection of the FortiNet firewall for all RU network traffic. Don’t hesitate to contatc us if you experience drawbacks.

Just like every year during the Christmas break, in the next weeks a full backup of many servers/filesystems onto tape will be made, that is preserved a long time. This will have the effect that servers will sometimes react slower during this period.

C&CZ recently installed a GitLab Pages server. With GitLab Pages, you can publish static websites directly from a repository in GitLab. To publish a website with Pages, you can use any static site generator, like Hugo, Harp, Mkdocs, or Hexo. You can also publish any website written directly in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. More info and documentation in the GitLab Pages documentation

The C&CZ administered “4 concurrent user” license for Maple has been continued until December 31, 2022. The latest version of Maple, Maple2021.2, for Windows/macOS/Linux can be found on the Install network share and has been installed on C&CZ managed Linux computers. License codes can be requested from C&CZ helpdesk or postmaster.

In the C&CZ operated GitLab service, GitLab Docker Container Registry service has been enabled. For more information, please have a look at the GitLab documentation.

Since the end of 2019, C&CZ offers Ceph as a choice for data storage, next to the traditional RAID storage on individual fileservers. Because demand for Ceph storage is rising, the Ceph storage has been upgraded from 1.8 PiB to 2.8 PiB gross. With this upgrade, storage servers have been placed in a central RU datacenter, so the Ceph storage is now distributed over three datacenters. If you want to try whether Ceph suits you, please contact C&CZ....

Because BitTorrent is considered to be a security risk (malware/reputation damage) and the traffic primarily consists of illegal downloads, the RU Security Operations Center (SOC) proposed to block this type of traffic from the RU network. Should this cause problems for research or education, we would like to hear from you, so we can notify the SOC and perhaps request an exception.

For the majority of the services C&CZ uses free software and open source software. Therefore, some time ago the idea emerged that the C&CZ employees would vote each year which projects would receive a donation from C&CZ. This year the Mozilla Foundation was chosen. Many people will know the Mozilla Firefox webbrowser and the mailclient Mozilla Thunderbird and maybe use it hours a day. But the Mozilla Foundation does a lot more to try to ensure the internet remains a public resource that is open and accessible to us all....

C&CZ has a workaround that one can try if on a self-managed/BYOD Windows pc one has problems printing due to the RU Peage PrintNightmare issue. This workaround can be found at the C&CZ Peage page.

To make it easier to install NI LabVIEW for departments that participate in the license, the newly arrived “Spring 2021” version has been copied to the Install network share. Install media can also be borrowed. License codes can be obtained from C&CZ helpdesk or postmaster. For macOS/Linux this version is necessary, for MS Windows one can also install LabVIEW from the NI website.