March 2006 -- Volume 3 -- Number 1 -------------------------------------- * Cycle Server Update We are pleased to announce the availability of 4 new cycle servers. These are Sun X4100 servers with dual, dual-core 2.2GHz Opteron 275 processors (four 64-bit processing cores) with 16GB RAM running the CentOS distribution of Linux. Collectively, they are known as "cycles" and can be reached via ssh to cycles.cs.princeton.edu. Individually, the machine names are soak, wash, rinse, and spin. IMPORTANT: Because we received complaints in the past that the penguin machines can be sluggish for interactive applications (e.g., reading e-mail with pine), we are requesting that CPU intensive, non-interactive applications be run exclusively on "cycles." To help enforce this, we won't be installing things like pine or firefox on the new servers. * Sun Ray Server Update We recently upgraded the Sun Ray Server. This is the server that runs the Sun Rays throughout the building. It's a faster machine that occupies 1/6 the rack space of the retired machine. With this upgrade, all of our Solaris cycle servers are running Solaris 10. * Emergency Status at status.cs.princeton.edu We now have a website for emergency status messages at status.cs.princeton.edu. This page is hosted outside of the university infrastructure. If you are having trouble connecting to the department, you can check there to see if there are any announcements. * Image Gallery It's been a while since we've added new photos to the rotation on the department's web page. If you have any photos to add to the gallery, please send them (or provide a link) to csstaff. Photos can be of the building (in different seasons), of people in the department, or related to projects. Be sure to include a caption indicating the subject, the photographer, and the date (minimally, the year) it was taken or created. * New Backup Policy/Schedule for Project Filesystems We have completed our evaluation our new backup infrastructure and are happy to announce that we are now backing up more of the project space. We have implemented the following policy based on the size of the project filesystem: - For Project Filesystems (size < 5G): * Nightly incremental backups with a 3 month retention * Weekly backups with a 1 year retention - For Project Filesystems (5G <= size < 50G): * Weekly backups with a 1 year retention - For Project Filesystems (50G <= size < 100G): * Monthly backups with a 1 year retention - For Project Filesystems (100G <= size < 500G): * Quarterly backups with a 1 year retention - For Project Filesystems (500G <= size): * NO regularly scheduled backups. For details, see: https://csguide.cs.princeton.edu/docs/backup.php * Logs for Virtual Web Hosts are Now Available If you maintain a virtual web host in the cs.princeton.edu domain, weekly logs are now available in /n/fs/weblogs. For example, if the virtual host is foobar.cs.princeton.edu then the logs are available as /n/fs/weblogs/foobar/foobar.log.gz. The logs are created early Sunday morning and overwrite the previous week's file. If you wish to preserve/archive your logs, it is up to you to copy them from this staging area each week. For details, see: https://csguide.cs.princeton.edu/docs/weblog.php * Power Mailing List As a service to people in the department with equipment on battery backup, we have created a read-only mailing list called "power" for notifications of actual (as opposed to planned) power events in the CS Building. These include power failure and power restoration as well as On-/Off-Battery events for the main UPS in room 218. (We will add events for the Friend Center UPS that powers the Friend Center lab and CS 002 in the future.) The primary benefit of the list is to let people know when their equipment is on battery power. They can then decide if they want to remotely login to their servers and cleanly shutdown equipment before the batteries discharge. To subscribe, visit: https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/power * Wiki As an experimental service, we have created a Wiki for the benefit of our department and our research collaborators. (A Wiki is a website that lets people collaboratively edit the content.) Our Wiki is located here: http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu Before using the Wiki, please read http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu/index.php/CSWiki:About which emphasizes the experimental nature of this service. * Moodle replaces Whiteboard The open-source course management system (CMS), Moodle, is now available to CS instructors as an alternative/extension to Blackboard. This replaces our previous, home-grown system called Whiteboard. Our local page is at http://moodle.cs.princeton.edu/ and is supporting COS126 and COS226. * 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. If you are a Mac OS X user, you'll definitely want to check out the Apple Security Update 2006-001. See this CERT alert for details: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA06-062A.html