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IRIS

Instructional & Research Information Systems

Highlights

Highlighted news items and key announcements.

IT Support During Winter 2024 Energy Curtailment

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Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Tuesday, December 24 to Wednesday, January 1, reopening on Thursday, January 2, 2024. Additionally, much of campus is on reduced support for January 2-3.

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. You may wish to turn off any workstations or printers in your office, to help with energy savings.

The IRIS Helpdesk office will be closed Monday, December 23 through Friday, January 3, re-opening on Monday, January 6. If you need assistance between January 2-3, please email help@eecs, and we may be able to schedule an appointment with you. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (510-642-7777) or emailed to help@eecs during the campus closure period, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until at least January 2.

Requests for network support or new IRIS accounts that are received after noon Tuesday, December 17 may not be processed until January 6, 2024.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (for details, see the Instructional website). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs email over the break. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until at least January 2.

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

Information regarding campus IT closures is available here: https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/reduced-it-support-winter-holidays

Happy Holidays!

New DNS Nameserver: themis.eecs

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System administrators in EECS may be familiar with our DNS nameservers cronus and rhea. We now have a new nameserver, physically located in Cory Hall, named themis. If your systems are typical DHCP clients, or you don’t use the EECS wired network, then you should have nothing to change.

We are planning to replace and retire rhea according to the following schedule:

  • Thu Oct 15 — We will update our DHCP configuration, telling Cory Hall DHCP clients to use themis and cronus, and telling other DHCP clients to use cronus and themis.
  • November/December — We will monitor any continued usage of rhea for DNS, and periodically alert system administrators so they can update their systems to use themis instead.
  • early January — We will retire rhea, but will point its name and IP address at cronus.

IT Support During Winter 2023 Energy Curtailment

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Due to the Winter Holiday, Energy Curtailment, and New Year’s Holidays, the Berkeley campus is officially closed for the period Monday, December 25 to Tuesday, January 2, reopening on Wednesday, January 3, 2024. 

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.

The IRIS Helpdesk office will be closed Wednesday, December 20 through Friday, January 5, re-opening on January 8. Helpdesk staff will be operating remotely December 20-23, and January 3-5. If you need on-site assistance between December 20-23 or January 3-5, please email help@eecs, and we may be able to schedule an appointment with you. Problem reports can be left on the Helpdesk voice mail (510-642-7777) or emailed to help@eecs during the campus closure period, but staff may not receive or reply to these messages until January 3.

Requests for new IRIS accounts that are received after 5pm December 15 may not be processed until January 3, 2024. Requests for network support that are received after 5pm December 20 may not be processed until January 3, 2024.

During the break, Instructional labs will be locked, but the main servers will remain online (for details, see the Instructional website). Instructional support staff will occasionally monitor inst@eecs email over the break. Please be aware, though, that staff may not be able to respond or reply to messages until January 3.

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

Information regarding campus IT closures is available here: https://technology.berkeley.edu/news/reduced-it-support-fall-winter-holidays

Happy Holidays!

Announcing Retirement of the EECS-PSK Wireless Network

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EECS-PSK Broadcast Ceases May 19th

On Friday, May 19th at 6:30AM, we will cease public broadcast of the EECS-PSK wireless network. The network will continue to exist and devices already configured to use it will be able to continue to do so throughout the Summer semester. However, it will not be available as a visible option to new devices which are not currently configured to connect to EECS-PSK. In other words, EECS-PSK will become a hidden SSID.

We recommend users of EECS-PSK immediately begin transitioning to either eduroam or Berkeley-IoT. eduroam is appropriate for devices such as laptops, desktops, phones and tablets; whereas Berkeley-IoT is appropriate for simpler devices which are not capable of authenticating to eduroam (i.e. devices which cannot perform 802.1X authentication).

Information about how to connect to eduroam and Berkeley-IoT is available at https://technology.berkeley.edu/wi-fi.

Please read the full post below for more information, including the final shutdown date for EECS-PSK. Contact us at help@eecs.berkeley.edu if you have any questions or concerns.

[Read more…] about Announcing Retirement of the EECS-PSK Wireless Network

IRIS to begin syncing names from CalNet

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Currently, when an IRIS account is created, the account name is set by the person requesting the account. It can be changed afterward, but such requests are processed manually.

In order to facilitate compliance with the new Gender Recognition and Lived Name policy, beginning on April 4, IRIS will begin syncing the following fields from the CalNet Directory to our systems:

  • First Name
  • Last Name

These fields are under the direct control of the owner. You can use a form on the CalNet website to update these fields.  We strongly recommend everyone review their current name settings so they are not surprised by any changes. You may have one of those accounts where your last name is in all capital letters – this is where you can change that.

We will sync these fields over from CalNet once a day at about 7am.  The updated fields will appear in these places:

One added benefit of this is that we will begin supporting Unicode characters in these name fields so that we can properly display non-Latin characters.  You can add Unicode characters using the CalNet update form.

Campus Wi-Fi Support for Fall Start

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As many return to campus for the beginning of Fall Semester, we fully expect to experience some issues with campus Wi-Fi. Campus has made many improvements to our growing Aruba Wi-Fi infrastructure, but increased traffic may reveal additional avenues for improvement. And some people will need assistance with individual devices on Wi-Fi.

Beginning next Monday, August 22, campus is increasing drop-in and phone support for Wi-Fi, for the first few weeks of the semester. Anybody with Wi-Fi issues is encouraged to call or drop-in, for quickest Wi-Fi support. An Instructor Hotline is available, and Hotspots can be requested. Please see the following page for details:

It’s important to troubleshoot any issues on a case-by-case basis, so that service can be improved for everyone.

Announcing Retirement of the EECS-Secure Wireless Network

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EECS-Secure Broadcast Ceases May 16

On Monday, May 16th, at 7AM we will cease public broadcast of the EECS-Secure wireless network. The network will continue to exist and devices already configured to use it will be able to continue to do so. However, it will not be available as a visible option to new devices which are not currently configured to connect to EECS-Secure. In other words, EECS-Secure will become a hidden SSID.

We recommend users of EECS-Secure begin transitioning to eduroam effective immediately. Information about how to connect to eduroam is available at:
https://technology.berkeley.edu/wi-fi

Please read the full post below for more information.

[Read more…] about Announcing Retirement of the EECS-Secure Wireless Network