July 2005 -- Volume 2 -- Number 2
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* Shades Upgrade
On Tuesday, July 26, 2005, we will upgrade the Solaris public cycle
servers (the "shades" machines: bolle, oakley, and rayban). This
upgrade will be to a machine with a faster CPU and will include an
OS upgrade to Solaris 10.
If you would like to try out a Solaris 10 cycle server before the
downtime, we have set up a temporary host that is reachable from
within the department (no direct external access). Users can
login to revo.cs.princeton.edu.
Please note that any user crontab entries on the shades machines
will be lost. If you have a cron job running on the shades machines,
be sure to remember to create a new crontab entry after the switch
on Tuesday morning.
* Unix Group Renumbering
Years ago when the CS file servers were created, Unix groups were
established such as fac, grad, ug, office, guest, and research.
At that time, CS Staff assigned unused numbers to these groups.
In the intervening years, both Solaris and Linux started to use
some of these same numbers for system groups. As a result, we now
have some rather "interesting" collisions. For example, the faculty
and grad student groups have the same numbers as the Linux system
groups "games" and "gopher" (respectively).
During the summer downtimes, we are renumbering the groups to avoid
the collisions. At best, these conflicts are a minor administrative
nuisance; at worst, these are a potential security threat. We have
already renumbered the CS Staff, Office Staff, and Guest groups.
Most users will not notice the change. However, if you have any
scripts that "chgrp" files using group numbers, you will need to
update these scripts to use group names.
* UPS Replacement for Room 218
On July 7, 2005, we brought up a new uniterruptable power supply
(UPS) in the 218 machine room. Due to a scheduling problem with
the UPS vendor we had to extend the maintenance window into the
afternoon. We thank everyone for their patience during this
extended downtime.
* Security Updates
And finally, this is a reminder to keep your machines up-to-date
with respect to security patches for both the operating system as
well as applications. There have been several important updates
to Linux, Mac OS, and Windows over the past couple of months.