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. ...

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.” ...

The latest version of Maple, Maple2025, 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.