Support:Old News

These are taken from the /etc/motd (message of the day) with minor editing.

September 30, 2010

All Math department Solaris machines are officially out of support. If you have a Solaris workstation please consider replacing it with a Mac or PC. Please use login.math.berkeley.edu (a.k.a. panda) as SSH login server. Though the old servers blue1 and blue3 are still alive, they may get decommissioned without announcement.

October 2, 2009

Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares.

September 29

During next few days, the thin clients in the lab 744 will be configured to use a new Math thin client server called beyonce (replacement of older twiggy). Note that the new server comes with GNOME windows manager.

September 23, 2009

Reminder: The old mail server mail.math.berkeley.edu is going to be decommisioned soon. Please move the content of former mail inbox to your home directory before Sep 30, 2009, if you have not done so already. The old mail server will stop responding to IMAP requests on Sep. 30, 2009.

July 7, 2009

As of Jun 30 /var/mail is no longer mounted from the old mail server. Use IMAP capable email client to access the old inbox.

April 6, 2009

Mail service was switched to Calmail. Be sure to read our CalMail conversion wiki page.

April 1, 2009

login.math.berkeley.edu is back in service as of 9:00 A.M. today.

March 31, 2009

The login server (login.math.berkeley.edu) became unavailable today. The server went down due to lack of memory, because someone ran magma. Please do not run magma on login.math!

March 1, 2009

The mail server was down for several hours early this morning.

February 23, 2009

The Computer Committee has just announced the long awaited transition of our email system to Calmail. Here is our transition page, including an excerpt from the mail to faculty announcing that change.

February 18, 2009

We now have a wiki devoted to computer support. See /computing/wiki.

February 15, 2009

A change in the filesystem on the mail server took place today, starting at 12:00 M. Basically this affects only users who read mail on linux/unix workstations in private offices. Read the announcement.

February 1, 2009

Matlab licenses have expired. This is a campus-wide problem. We now have temporary licenses. Campus Software Distribution is working diligently on the problem, and we should have our permanent license back in place soon.

December 30, 2008

The thin client lab is back in service.

December 19, 2008

The thin client lab is down due to the server hardware failure.

November 3, 2008

A new printer has been installed in room 1002. Try it out!

October 28, 2008

The Mail Server was off line, but is now back and working normally.

October 10, 2008

The thin client lab was down for 3 hours today due to the server overload. We have set temporary user limits on virtual memory (1.25 GB) and the number of processes (100) to alleviate the overload problem.

October 3, 2008

The math mail server was down from approximately 6:00 PM until 9:30 PM. Full email functionality was restored at 4:00 AM.

October 3, 2008

The thin client lab in 744 was down for a while today due to a server problem. A runaway application program (ekiga) overloaded the server. That program has now been removed.

September 29, 2008

The new (thin client) computer lab in 744 is now open. Please report any problem to request@math.berkeley.edu.

September 26, 2008

The 7th floor public printer has been moved from room 708 to 744 (the new computer lab). Please use printer name(s) 744 (744s) instead of 708 (708s).

September 10, 2008

Mail server certificate problems. Now working. Read about it on http://mail.math.berkeley.edu/computing/status/mailserver.html

August 11, 2008

Scheduled power shutdown for the seventh floor of Evans Hall. More details at /computing/powerdown.html.

July 12, 2008

Work was done on the AirBears system serving the northeast quadrant of campus, including Evans Hall.

July 3, 2008

Tonight's scheduled maintenance lasted until 7:15 P.M.

December 18, 2007

login.math had an 'out of memory' error and was manually restarted.

December 13, 2007

Printing problems on Solaris machines fixed.

November 28, 2007

login.math (panda) was unexpectedly offline overnight, but is now back in service.

July 6, 2007

matlab-r2007a was installed.

June 8, 2007

Our file/account server (gold) was briefly off line for maintenance on Sunday, June 10 at 4:00 PM.

June 4, 2007

Printing via AirBears has been reenabled.

May 31, 2007

The login server (login.math.berkeley.edu) was upgraded to Redhat Enterprise Linux 5, 64-bit (with 32-bit support).

May 7, 2007

The login server (login.math.berkeley.edu) had a disk failure that was repaired within a day.

May 2, 2007

On Thursday, during our routine monthly server maintenance, the operating system on our web server was upgraded. To minimize potential disruptions, other web software (apache, php, mysql, phpwebsite) was not upgraded.

Apr 30, 2007

Our main server (gold) crashed in the middle of the night. The cause is still unknown. Ramifications were felt throughout the day, as almost every client and server that we operate depends on gold in some manner. All services have now been restored and stabilized.

Apr 28, 2007

Spamhaus spam rejection was reenabled.

Apr 27, 2007

All spam blocking on our mail server has been suspended, pending decisions by the computer committee. A user has complained that certain changes resulted in failures on some mail clients. The computer committee will review this complaint, and decide how to handle spam blocking, in general, if at all.

Apr 23, 2007

Last week, after consulting with the departmental computer committee and the "consult" mailing list, we made the decision to try blocking spam using a service called "spamhaus". This is a DNS Black Listing service, which has a very good reputation, and is in use by many mail servers, including CalMail. This was put in place over the weekend, and we're now using it on a trial basis. This decision was not made lightly, as we've been very resistant to relying on any external authority for blocking spam. However, the ever-increasing load placed on our users, server, and administrators, by spam, as well as the loss of our most effective blocker (milter-sender) brought us to this point.

Mail which comes from a domain tagged as a source of spam and/or malware is immediately rejected, without any processing by our mail server. You can read more about it on http://www.spamhaus.org, if you want. The server that we're using for blocking is SBL+XBL.

As of now, we're blocking based on spamhaus, and tagging based on the SpamAssassin, using the default rules.

In addition, RFCs (internet standards) for the HELO/EHLO greeting are now being more strictly enforced. Machines which are not configured to use a proper greeting are not allowed to connect to our server.

It's possible to do additional fine tuning, but our goal is to reduce the amount of sysadmin time that we spend on mail server administration, so if this is fairly effective, we may do no more.

Apr 2, 2007

MAIL SERVER UPGRADE: Thursday, April 5, during our normal server maintenance period, the operating system on our mail server was upgraded. Unfortunately, the mail server was out of service for several hours, finally returning to service in the early morning on Friday. Several unforeseen problems occurred, including an unrelated system crash of gold, our main fileserver.

After this upgrade, milter-sender is no longer available, and spam tagging has changed. For more details, see the Mail Server, page.

Dec 13, 2006

Due to ongoing, and escalating, printer "spam", we've disabled access to our printers from AirBears. Vandals have been wasting printer resources, and sending pornographic images to our printers. We're now looking for an authentication scheme which will allow legitimate users access from AirBears.

Nov 13, 2006

The login server, login.math.berkeley.edu (panda) was moved to a new IP address this afternoon. Unfortunately, it took several hours before we and CNS were able to get the new configuration right, so it was unavailable until about 10:00 P.M. Things are back to normal, now.

Aug 24, 2006

/home/scratch (20GB) is available for your use.

July 27, 2006

A security incident has required us to reinstall the operating system on many of our computers, including most of our servers. Reinstallation of Solaris workstations is proceeding at a slower pace.

Jun 15, 2006

Our TeX system was upgraded to teTeX 3.0 on June 14. Most users should not notice any difference. For details, see /~vojta/tex/tetex3.html.

May 10, 2006

The printing system in use on the Math network has now been standardized, using CUPS software. Previously, we had used native Solaris lpr/lpq on Solaris clients, LPRng on one print server, and CUPS on the other print server, with linux clients using CUPS. More information is available.

March 8, 2006

Matlab was upgraded to version 7.0, Release 14, on our linux hosts. This brings the versions on linux and Solaris to the same level.

February 21, 2006

Printing to the Canon 9070 multifunction device is now working. Use the queue names 958 and 958s.

January 4, 2006

Our canonical login server, login.math.berkeley.edu, which has for years pointed to yuban (blue1), was changed on January 2, 2006. The new login server is named panda.math.berkeley.edu. panda is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is a Sun dual processor Opteron system, graciously provided for the department by Alberto Grunbaum.

The old server, yuban, which runs Solaris, will continue to be available as long as it runs; it is old, unsupported hardware, so at some point, when it breaks, it will be summarily retired.