Yesterday Matlab R2013a has been installed. Today at 13:00 hours many servers started to automatically copy this 5.4 GB to their local disc. Some parts of the network were overloaded by all these copying, which made accessing the network slow for many users. The distribution of this software will now be scheduled to happen over a longer period, primarily outside of working hours.
Monday, March 4th 2013 at 18:00 hours, the number of IP numbers that is available in the FNWI buildings for ru-wlan and Science will be doubled. Because ru-wlan moves to a new range, users of ru-wlan will lose connectivity for at most 15 minutes. There was already a plan to replace ru-wlan and Science within the FNWI buildings by the RU-wide Eduroam and ru-wlan, but the wireless network usage has grown so fast that we can not wait for this plan to be realized. Last week some wireless users at times could not even get an IP address, although the lease time had been brought down to 30 minutes. Therefore this temporary measure became necessary on such short notice.
On Monday feb 18 at 6:00 pm there will be some maintenance at the wireless network which will effect the following locations at Toernooiveld: FNWI cellar A1 FEL Huygens: Library of Science, terrace behind Huygens, cantine, room HG-1.132 KDV1 en KDV2 Linnaeus building Logistic Centre Mercator I Mercator II, ground floor and 7nd floor Mercator III, 2nd floor Transitorium FNWI (ACSW and FELIX) UBC We expect the service will be completely available again within 30 minutes.
The last few days three Science users have supplied their Science password to phishers. We notice that because Internet criminals use these passwords to get into the Science mail servers (horde webmail, smtp) in order to send spam. This time they even used a fake copy of the horde Science webmail website. The big differences with the real horde Science webmail website are: the URL is not within science.ru.nl the connection is not a secure https connection, there is no lock the username and password do not arrive at C&CZ servers, but in the hands of Internet criminals. PLEASE: do not naively click on a link in an e-mail!
On Monday, January 28th 2013 at 8:00 am, one of the servers that is being used by the wireless network of the RU, will be replaced. This replacement will affect you as a user of the wireless networks ru-wlan and eduroam: There will appear a new certificate when connecting. You can just accept this, after which the connection should work. If this appears not to be the case, then it’s best that you remove your old Eduroam- respectively your old RU-WLAN settings first to activate the new connection . ...
Because the file server crashed, it had to be rebooted.
Older Fedora desktop PC’s may experience startup problems after an upgrade of one of our LDAP servers. A fix is available and has been applied. If you still encounter this problem, please contact C&CZ.
Horde webmail again appeared to be misused for sending spam. This could happen because a naive user gave the Science password to phishers/spammers. After first stopping horde, early Friday morning we disabled the account of the naive user and restarted horde. Saturday morning it appeared that this short spam-outbreak had caused administrators of hotmail.com to add our mail server to their blacklist. Therefore we switched the IP-number of this mail server Saturday morning.
During the night of wednesday on thursday a power outage resulted in a network outage in the basement computing facilities. The power was restored to the network equipment using a bypass thus circumventing the UPS at about 09:15. Further checks implied that most servers had not become powerless so that most services became automatically available again. Network drivers on “bundle” had to be restarted in order to get access to home directories for a large number of users. Furthermore, several websites had to be restarted which made it possible for PC’s to boot properly. During the day, an unrelated issue with the RAID storage of “plus” has been fixed as well granting access to the following network shares: sofie, ams*, molchem, mb*, encapson, milkun4, snn, neuropi, digicd. carta, … Since wireless devices were unable to acquire IP addresses, i.e. gain access to the network, a split-brain situation was diagnosed within the DHCP service which was resolved around 13:00.
Next Friday morning, the home server “pile” will be rebooted. There are problems with the snapshots, which could make a reboot take more time. Therefore we schedule the reboot for early next Friday.