===================================================================== Stony Brook University Computer Science SYSTEMS STAFF MONTHLY NEWSLETTER May 2008 ===================================================================== Todo: - mention Ajay's help w/ admitted students day and Brian's help with open house. ===================================================================== In this issue we have 8 general announcements, 7 ongoing-work items, 1 future work items, and 4 reminders. *** ANNOUNCEMENTS 1. Installed Net Beans 6.0.1 in the translab, rooms 2114, 2126 and 2129. We had massive image corruptions during the installation, and a lot of manual effort had to be put in to get the teaching lab up and running. The new Net Beans comes with the working version of Tomcat, which students can use to demo their projects. 2. Fax Workstations We are planning to upgrade the hardware for the fax workstations during the coming week. These workstations allow DVD burning, color printing and scanning. You can use your UNIX username and password to login to these workstations. 3. Ongoing electrical problems causing multiple system failures We have been experiencing ever increasing electrical problems in the CS building. To date we have lost 3 network switches, 3 HDD, 3 complete UPS, numerous large UPS batteries at a total value of $5400.00 4. Mail interruption on April 20th A system that services mail from outside CS failed on April 20th. delaying the processing of external email. The system was repaired and in service late the same day and queued mail was delivered later that day. 5. Mail interruption on April 25/26 A bug in a GIT script in a research lab caused its' CVS server to fill the mail spool of the department mail server. 6. Switch failure on April 27 disrupts dept network A network switch failed disrupting networking in CS. The failure can be directly attributed to ongoing electrical problems in CS. 7. Power disruptions cause network disruptions April 30, May 1st A power disruption in part of the CS building disrupted networking at 8:30PM April 30th and at 12:04PM on May 1st. XXX *** ONGOING WORK 1. Wireless The staff is working to install new wireless access points to eliminate additional dead-spots at the PhD offices from rooms 1204 to 1212 and from room 2236 to 2212. 2. Imap and upgrade to webmail The staff is working on installation of Dovecot Imap server and enhancements to the webmail system (e.g., creation of folders). 3. Faculty Printing facility Work continues on enabling Faculty office workstations and laptops (part of the Faculty backup system) to be able to print directly and securely to department printers. A separate notification will be sent to faculty once the new system is in place. 4. CEWIT We are in the process of setting up a monitoring system called 'Nagios' for the Rocks Cluster Frontend. Nagios is capable of sending email alerts and monitoring Windows/Linux machines at various hardware and service levels. This will hopefully provide more proactive discovery and repair of problems. 5. Backup server Work continues on the backup server being setup to address backup needs including research labs and CEWIT. We hope it becomes available during the Spring 2008 term. -Veritas Netbackup Enterprise Server software has been installed and is being configured and tested. -The storage array is online and data dumps are also being tested. 6. User Provisioning and integrated file services We are working on a long-term project to integrate all the user logins and file services in the department. The same login will work on UNIX, Windows and other infrastructure services provided by the department. Also, the file servers will be accessible from various systems. 7. New mail/dns/anti-spam servers. We are continuing to setup and install a new set of Linux-based servers to replace the aging Solaris servers. They are expected to be deployed during the Spring 2008 term. *** FUTURE PLANS 1. Summer plans We plan to upgrade the servers in the Undergraduate Labs and workstations in 2129 to be able to handle Vista and Windows Server 2008 configurations. In the process, we will also increase student storage quotas. The new workstations in the teaching lab will have 4GB RAM, quad-core CPUs, better graphics card supporting DirectX 10, and Gigabit network interfaces. We are planning on server consolidation using virtualization with failover mechanisms. 2. Dynamic provisioning of CEWIT systems The staff is working on mechanisms to dynamically allocate portions of the CEWIT cluster. We're exploring some new software from CA. ** REMINDERS 1. Staff hot-line 2-2772 (CSSB). It will ring all staff office phones and has voicemail. Business hours are 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon-Fri except State and Federal holidays. 2. CEWIT The CEWIT reporting website is: . There are 110 compute nodes (Dell, Xeon cpu). There are two HP 32GB RAM 4-CPU nodes available (compute-1-0, compute-1-1). There are 46 storage nodes online with 50TB of scratch space via PVFS. A number of additional nodes are assigned to "Planet Lab". If you are interested in projects for CEWIT, Planet Lab or have specific requests for support (add software, problems, questions) please use WREQ to send the request. 3. WREQ Problem Reporting Tool Work requests and problem reports must be submitted to WREQ and not to ntadmin/root or individual staff members. This helps us track the progress of work requests better. We suggest using the Web interface to submit wreq requests at the URL: . You can also email wreq at cs.sunysb.edu but the Web interface is preferred. If you send email, please send plain text (without MIME attachments) and send from your CS department account. 4. SECWREQ Problem Reporting Tool You are encouraged to use SECWREQ for requests such as requisitions, course room changes, office supplies, grade changes, room reservations, payroll issues, tuition issues, reimbursements and building management issues (heat/cooling/ lights/leaking roof). The SECWREQ tool is located at: . You can send mail to secwreq at cs.sunysb.edu; please do not send MIME mail or attachments there. Send email from your CS department account.