ECE Facilities Dec. 2000 Newsletter
Lou Anschuetz
* From December 1, 2000 until December 11, 2000 ECE Facilities will be
significantly short staffed. Please be aware that this may result in
much longer than usual response times on certain service requests.
* We've noted a few folks ordering machines from SAG lately. Please be
aware that we have had occasion to work on a few of these machines and
there have been serious problems with installing certain operating
systems, hardware and software support. While these machines may be
slightly cheaper than Dell equipment, our experience suggests that these
are not the bargains they appear to be. We continue to recommend Dell
Optiplex as the best value per dollar spent.
* Remember that December 26 is the day campus shuts down Cyert Hall. For
part or all of that day services in ECE will be unavailable. Those services
include AFS, meaning that logins will be unavailable on UNIX machines.
There will be no access to Andrew services nor the Internet that day.
In addition, this year part of Hamerschlag Hall will be powered
down to allow for the flushing of PCBs from a building transformer. The
extent of the outage is not yet fully determined, though it is known
that the D-level machine room and the Clean room will be powered off
during that time. This outage is to last approximately 18 hours, beginning
at roughly 6:00a.m. on the 26th. It is imperative, therefore, that
you plan ahead for a complete lack of computing service on the 26th,
with some impact still felt on the 27th of December.
* REMINDER: when possible, please make sure you are using ssh to
connect to and between machines in the department. Versions are
available for the PC and it is installed on all supported
Unix machines.
* AFS for Windows 2000 is now available for supported machines. If
you would like it installed please send mail to gripe@ece.
* Backups
* if you replace, add, upgrade, or otherwise modify the disk
layout in a machine that is supported and being backed up please
send mail to gripe@ece letting us know what changes were made. If
you do not there is a possibility that data on the new disk won't
be backed up for several days.
* Please note that there will be a new client for Corporate Time available
soon. It is imperative that you install the new client
on PCs and Macs or you will not be able to use Corporate Time beginning
around December 13. This release has no significant user changes, but
does incorporate Kerberos, which will prevent your password from traveling
across campus. Further information about this change will be distributed
to you during December.
* We ask that faculty members provide any software to be used in Spring 2001
courses to ECE facilities by January 1, 2001. As it can sometimes take a
substantial amount of time for software to be correctly configured,
this date allows us time to insure functionality. Software received after
that date may not be available at the desired time.
* Following are the gripe system statistics:
In December we processed approximately 640 gripes
Gripe Status Report for 11/01/2000 to 11/30/2000
User Closed Current 30-60d 60-90d Older (Open) Total
afleming 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
alan 20 2 1 1 0 4 24
allbery 154 2 0 0 0 2 156
dwilhelm 43 7 6 1 1 15 58
egadd 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
grosland 48 5 0 0 0 5 53
henson 32 9 4 3 11 27 59
jmck 109 2 2 2 0 6 115
lou 198 1 0 0 0 1 199
mmh 5 2 0 0 0 2 7
rburgett 0 1 4 2 1 8 8
tardis 12 5 1 1 0 7 19
zoog 20 7 5 5 0 17 37
TOTAL 643 43 23 15 13 94 737
The oldest open gripe is 383.4 days old. The median is 32.4 days.
The most idle gripe has been idle for 367.4 days. The median is 29.3 days.
The oldest unacknowledged gripe is 157.6 days old. The median is 25.9 days.
Average gripe acknowledgement time: 0.7 days (median: 0)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 5.5 days (median: 2.3)
Average gripe resolution time: 3.1 days (median: 0.1)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 11.7 days (median: 4.9)
- Virtually all the news below this point is related to UNIX
users. Please read on, but be aware that is more technical and
may not apply to all users.
* The backup server host was upgraded to a Sun Ultra 60.
* We continue to audit machines and drives for the backup.
* CEDA USERS - elvis.ece.cmu.edu is scheduled for an operating system
upgrade on December 26 or 27. This will be done in conjunction with
the annual outage for fire alarm testing. Because of additional
work being done to the electrical systems in Cyert Hall on the 26th
it is possible that the machine won't be available again until
December 27.
Every effort will be made to maintain the contents of /scratch* but
we *CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT THESE PARTITIONS WILL NOT BE REFORMATTED*
so please make sure that any data on those partitions that is
important to you is backed up in other locations.
Additional reminders will be sent to the various CEDA mailing lists.
* Pending shakedown testing of the server binaries, Facilities will be upgrading
to AFS version 3.6, Patch 1, over winter break. This upgrade will affect our
AFS servers, as well as all supported machines of the following systypes:
alpha_dux40
i386_suse62
rs_aix43
sun4x_56
sun4x_57
* As previously announced, Facilities will be upgrading the vendor C, C++, and
Fortran (77 and 90) compilers, from version 5.0 to version 6, on supported
machines running Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7. This upgrade will occur over
winter break. While we forsee no difficulties, if you wish to test existing
code under the new compiler before it is deployed, please contact
gr...@ece.cmu.edu and arrangements will be made.
* reinstalled Cadence IC 4.4.5 for AIX platforms
* installed 4 new Linux based machines in the HH1107 cluster.
* installed Frame 6.0. it is available for testing at
/afs/ece/support/frame/6.0/share/image/usr/local/frame60. Please
note that we will begin phasing out older releases around Feb 1,
2001.
* installed Neocell 1.9
* installed updated OPnet licenses
* installed updated Monterey Software licenses
* generated more course accounts
* ECE's print server was rebuilt twice during the last month because of disk
failures. It is still running with a higher load than it was intended to
handle; a new machine has been obtained to replace it.
* Solaris 7 machines didn't have proper shared memory settings. This has been
fixed but some machines may still need to be rebooted to activate the new
settings.
* We can now sync accounts between machines running different operating systems
(except that AIX can only be a master, it cannot accept accounts from non-AIX
systems).
* New Perl modules: C-Scan Data::Flow Authen::Krb4 Net::SSLeay IO::Socket::SSL
* You can now check the status of cluster machines via the web:
Alpha Cluster: http://black.ece.cmu.edu
Sun Cluster: http://pegasus.ece.cmu.edu
--
Lou Anschuetz, l...@ece.cmu.edu
Network Manager, ECE, Carnegie Mellon University