IRIS

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!

The Soda Helpdesk (313 Soda Hall) will be closed beginning December 13, as our student staff prepare for finals and the approaching winter break. We will re-open in mid-January.

The Cory Helpdesk (395 Cory Hall) will remain open on a normal schedule of 9-5, but will be closed during the University break (December 24 to January 1).

If you’ve ever wondered how many System Registrations, Updates, or Deregistrations IRIS receives in a given month or on average for the year, your question has finally been answered.

Head on over to the [reports](/reports) page and see for yourself.

While you’re there, you may also want to peruse our selection of past CNIL annual reports.

The CNAME imap.EECS.Berkeley.EDU which currently points at the production IMAP server imap4.CS.Berkeley.EDU will be changed to point at a new system that is an IMAP/Webmail multiplexer.

This change will take effect at noon today.

This change should cause no problems; this message is to inform the general public.

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007.

PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will automatically patch and reboot Wednesday, Dec 12th, at 3:00 am.

HERMES and macserver.eecs will be down for patching and maintenance Wednesday, Dec 12th, from 3:00p-5:00p.

As of 10:30 this morning, I have installed a patched version of code in our firewalls. I have also disabled the TCP-SYN-CHK that can cause some applications to time out (SSH was the most common application noticed). Please send a note to networks@eecs if any unusual behavior is noted across the firewall.