Technical update for mail‑domain DNS administrators What and why we are doing this With the new setup we are renaming our mail‑component servers so that their names reflect the function they perform in the mail chain. This change has no impact on end users, but it makes troubleshooting and future feature implementation easier because we can immediately identify the machine involved. First step We have renamed mx3 to inboundmx3. Because this is essentially only a DNS change, we have also updated all MX records we manage. Domains for which we provide mail but do not control the DNS must be updated by their own administrators. ...

For a long time, at least since before Covid-19, we have hosted a local jitsi meet installation. The installation was becoming a bit old and stuffy, so time for a new version and a new name. Meet is our new jitsi install for general use. Jitsi Test is our test jitsi install, when we test new features here, so can you. The *old jitsi will be retired soon, so please go try the new one. ...

Enhanced Email Security We are pleased to announce we have completed the first step in the update to our email system. This will improve the security and reliability of your mail handling. As part of this upgrade, we have introduced new software at the start of our email flow (on the inbound MX servers). This advanced system now evaluates incoming emails to determine if they are legitimate. If an email fails to meet the required standards or appears very suspicious, it will be blocked at the entry point, in accordance with RFC guidelines for mail transport. This is a crucial first step toward creating a safer and more secure email environment for everyone. ...

C&CZ was the first to implement e-mail (@sci.kun.nl) at the KUN (Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen), some 35 years ago. Some configurations we have used since then have not kept up with the changing landscape of e-mail implementations worldwide. In Dutch there’s a saying for this: “De wet van de remmende voorsprong”. One of the major things that have changed over time is dealing with SPAM. For instance, there are now protocols that major e-mail players require and therefore became the de facto standard for email communication. ...

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. ...

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. ...