Rob McNicholas

We are pleased to announce that we are now making VMWare Fusion available to Mac users in EECS at no extra cost.

## What is Fusion?
Fusion is a virtualization application which lets you run other
operating systems simultaneously with OS X. For example, one could run Microsoft Windows on top of OS X, allowing a Mac user to take advantage of all the Windows site-licensed software that is available on campus.

## How to Get It
To pick up your Fusion serial number:

– Visit the EECS Helpdesk in 395 Cory between 9am-5pm, Monday-Friday with the following:
1. a photo ID
2. the name or serial number of your registered computer

– You will receive a unique serial number to activate a copy of Fusion.

You can then visit the VMWare website to register your serial number:
http://www.vmware.com/registernow

On the VMWare webite, create a new account, and register the serial
number you were given by the helpdesk. You can then download the latest
version of the software from http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion

## If You Want To Install Windows
Please Note: Fusion does not include any other operating systems, so if
you want to install Windows on your Mac, you still need a valid
Microsoft Windows license and media. You can sign out an
EECS-site-licensed copy of Microsoft Windows XP from the helpdesk at the
time you pick up your Fusion license key, or you can use any other legal
copy of Windows, Solaris, Linux or FreeBSD you wish.

## How to Get Help
While they are distributing the keys, the EECS helpdesk is not geared up
to provide technical support for Fusion, so you will need to avail
yourselves of the free online resources if you run into any technical
issues. The mac-users@eecs mailing list can be used for local
discussions and community support. We also have a limited number of
support keys which can be used for support issues that require help from
VMWare. If you feel you need this sort of support, please contact
help@eecs.

## Who is Eligible
The cost of Fusion was funded by our EECS computer account fees, so this
offer is only open to EECS users with a standard computer account.

Please direct any questions to help@eecs.

Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Saturday, December 22 to Tuesday, January 1, reopening on Wednesday, January 2, 2008.

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. We expect full service to resume on January 2nd.

The EECS Department’s Computer Helpdesk will be closed during this time. 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 2nd.

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 2nd.

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!

IRIS is pleased to announced the availability of a new mailing list
service for the Department. Over the last few months, many official department lists have been migrated to this new service, and we are now opening it up to the community at large. Anyone with a standard EECS computer account can login to this server to see which department lists they are on, manage those subscriptions, or create and manage their own lists.

See the
online documentation on the IRIS website for details on how to access the service.

Anyone who currently manages a list on the old majordomo server is encouraged to migrate that list to the new service. For assistance with this migration, contact help@eecs.

The Department’s web server, www.eecs.berkeley.edu (as well as all other websites that are hosted on that machine) will be unavailable beginning at 5pm on Thursday, April 19. A critical operating system patch has been released from the vendor which requires a reboot. We expect the machine to be back up by 5:15pm.

We apologize for the short notice.
[Read more…] about Department Web Server scheduled outage, Apr 19, 5pm

Due to the Winter Holidays, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Saturday, 12/23/2006 to Tuesday, 01/02/2007.

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. We expect full service to resume on January 2nd.

The EECS Department’s Computer Helpdesk will be closed during this time. 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 2nd.

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 2nd.

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!

The IRIS website
will be moved to new hardware on Sunday, September 17, 2006. This involves migrating a large amount of data from our Oracle database to the new database server, and consequently the IRIS applications that depend on the database will be unavailable from midnight to 8pm during this migration. We expect the main IRIS website will remain up for most of this time, but brief outages will be noticeable during the transition.

The move to new hardware will greatly speed up our database applications, and in the long run will increase the reliability of our web services.

Please send questions or comments to help@eecs.

[Read more…] about IRIS Website maintenance, Sunday, Sep 17

Oracle has just released their quarterly critical patch update. This will be installed on the department’s Oracle server this Sunday, July 23, beginning at 9pm PST. This downtime will affect the website https://iris.eecs.berkeley.edu and all related applications, including the EECS Network & Roster databases.

The IRIS Web Site will be briefly unavailable around 5:30pm on Monday, June 12 for routine system maintenance. Total downtime should not exceed ten minutes.

During this time Network and Computer Account registration, query and update forms will be unavailable.

We regret any inconvenience caused by this downtime.

I will be taking our Oracle database down at 9pm on Sunday, April 23 to install the latest security patches. This is a relatively small patch, and the database should probably be back up by 10pm, but I’m scheduling 3 hours because…sometimes these things take longer.

During this time, the Network and Roster query and request forms will be down. All requests for web pages in those areas will be redirected to a page with information on the maintenance.

Send any questions or concerns to img@eecs.

-Rob

[Read more…] about IRIS Website Downtime, Sunday Apr 23, 9pm