Rob McNicholas

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Monday, December 26 to Friday, Dec 31, reopening on Monday, January 2, 2012.

All departmental computing servers will remain on and should be available during the break, but there will be no staff on site to provide any computing support or handle any requests. Automatic monitoring systems will alert staff to critical infrastructure problems, and any such problems will be dealt with on a best-effort basis. IRIS staff will be taking advantage of the holiday to do maintenance on some systems which will result in scattered outages, but any such downtime will be separately announced and posted on the IRIS website.

The IRIS Helpdesk will be closed beginning December 23 at 12:00 noon, and will reopen on January 2. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (2-7777) or emailed to help@eecs, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until January 2.

Requests for new IRIS accounts that are received after Dec 16 will be processed on January 2, 2012.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (imail.eecs, inst.eecs, cory.eecs, mamba.eecs and fileservice.eecs). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs over the break. If you are unable to contact inst@eecs, you can leave a message at 643-6141. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 2.

We recommend that all desktop computers be shutdown during the Energy Curtailment Period. If your Windows computer needs to stay on during the break, we recommend that you check with your system administrator to ensure that Automatic Updates are enabled with the option “Automatically download the updates and install them on the schedule that I specify” with a daily update schedule.

Computing support staff will be monitoring their email when possible, so please use standard email addresses to report any urgent problems. As a reminder:

* Instructional Computing Environment: inst@eecs
* Research / Staff Computing Environment: help@eecs

Enjoy your holiday break!

Historically, usernames in EECS / IRIS have been limited to 8 characters in length, to maintain compatibility with legacy Unix systems. Most modern operating systems can now handle longer usernames, and so to better align our services with CalNet and other campus systems, we will begin allowing usernames of up to 20 characters in length. We will be enforcing [the same requirements as CalNet](https://wikihub.berkeley.edu/display/calnet/CalNet+ID+Requirements).

IRIS staff have been testing our services with long usernames to ensure compatibility. As expected, some Unix-based system do still have some issues, and we will be providing documentation on the problems we find for our supported operating system (Mac OS X, Redhat/CentOS Linux, and
Solaris). This article will be updated later with links to that
documentation.

At this time we would like to invite system administrators, programmers, database administrators or others who have systems that utilize IRIS usernames to begin testing their systems. If you would like us to create a test username for you, please contact help@eecs and describe your requirements.

This change will only apply to new accounts created after October 1, 2011 We will not be allowing current account holders to change their username.

As always, please send questions or comments to help@eecs.berkeley.edu