Rob McNicholas

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the
Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Thursday, December 25 to
Sunday, January 4, reopening on Monday, January 5, 2009.

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 EECS Department’s Computing Helpdesk will be closed beginning Monday,
December 22nd, and will reopen on Monday, January 5th. 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 5th.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers should
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 5th.

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!

An upgraded web mail interface to the department’s IMAP server has been in testing since July at https://webmail.eecs.berkeley.edu .

This interface has a different look and feel from the old interface. It also allows the user to manage mail filters on the IMAP server. These rules are processed prior to any other rules that are in place, such as the rules on the server that processes SPAM.

No problems have been reported, so we are concluding the test period and making this the preferred webmail client.

On Monday, September 29th, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Mail and related URLs will begin forwarding to this new interface.

On November 20th, the old interface at https://imap.eecs.berkeley.edu will be permanently
turned off.

As part of this upgrade, the URL for changing the
SPAM/Virus/Trash deletion has been moved to
https://webmail.EECS.Berkeley.EDU:442.

Please send any questions or comments to help@eecs.

IRIS is pleased to announce that storage rates for the 2008–09 fiscal
year have been significantly reduced while the basic disk space
allocation has been greatly increased.

Previously, one’s IMAP account
and coeus home directory each had a 100MB base allocation and usage
over that base was recharged at $1.80/GB/month. The new model
includes a combined allocation of 5GB per person (a 25x increase!)
and usage over that base is recharged at $0.20/GB/month. “Project”
space usage will also reflect the new rate of $0.20/GB/month.

For all the details, please see our [FY 2008–09 rates](/10-services/90-rates/).

These new rates were driven by our recent upgrade of our storage
infrastructure to a fibre channel-based SAN, and the upcoming upgrade
our Network Appliance fileservers later this year. Our IMAP server is
already taking advantage of this new infrastructure which will improve
reliablity and expandability of our mail service.

We hope these new rates will encourage people to take greater
advantage of our storage services.

To check your current usage, visit this web page.

Please send any questions to help@eecs.