Microsoft has released Windows Vista to the public, but Vista will not be officially supported within the EECS department until such time as we can overcome certain licensing and technical issues.

The EECS department purchases the Windows OS and other Microsoft applications as a volume-based purchase from academic reseller TRC (now CDW-G). While we have complete OS images for other versions of Windows, our participation in the Microsoft Consolidated Campus Agreement at this time may only provide us with upgrade versions of Vista Business. To comply with our current licensing structure, a CIF-paying user would have to upgrade to Vista from a volume-licensed version of XP which has undergone Microsoft Validation. This also prevents us from offering network installation of Vista via Windows Deployment Services (WDS).

Perhaps more importantly, Vista Business edition is currently unable to mount Windows shares from our network fileservers coeus and project, meaning that Vista clients will for now be unable to mount one’s home directory or project space. IRIS staff will be working with Microsoft and Network Appliance as needed to see resolution to this issue. It is worth noting that Windows XP was not supported within EECS and had similar incompatibilities with our NetApp fileservers until XP Service Pack 1 was released.

IRIS will not be providing Vista via download or Helpdesk loan until it is ready to be officially supported within EECS. Those who have their own copy of Vista are free to use it at their own risk; we may not be able to provide direct assistance if any problems are encountered.
[Read more…] about Microsoft Vista Support in EECS

imap.eecs, the EECS IMAP mailserver, unexpectedly went offline this afternoon shortly after 1:30pm. Staff are investigating the matter, but were unable to rectify the situation remotely, and will need to handle it at the console.

Mail service is expected to resume as normal, with no loss of email, sometime later this evening.
[Read more…] about IMAP mailserver outage, Sunday, Nov 26, 2006

The EESWW server, cad.eecs, provides /usr/eesww fileservice to Unix/Linux machines (primarily Solaris machines) throughout the department. EESWW includes tools such as cadence and hspice.

cad.eecs will be offline for maintenance on Thursday, Nov 2nd, from about 9am until noon. We will be replacing a failing disk, and upgrading the operating system.

The EECS IMAP server, imap.eecs.berkeley.edu, unexpectedly went offline shortly after 10:30pm. IRIS staff are investigating.
[Read more…] about imap.eecs down

The unix/linux Software Warehouse fileserver sww.eecs suffered a power supply failure shortly after midnight last night, making /usr/sww unavailable for all clients which mount it.

As of about 12:45pm, all sww.eecs services have been restored, and clients which mount /usr/sww should be working as normal.

The EECS Exchange service on FONTUS is currently unavailable, as a result of some earlier trouble with one of the Windows domain controllers. Staff are currently working on the problem, but we do not yet have an estimate of when service will be restored.

The problem lies with the communication between the Exchange server and the Global Catalog server. There is no problem with FONTUS itself, and no mail should be lost.
[Read more…] about Exchange Server unavailable