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Instructional & Research Information Systems

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) not supported in EECS

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The EECS department Helpdesk and IRIS do not yet support the recently released Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). We will probably be unable to do so until January 2008 at the earliest, and possibly longer.

Further, we strongly discourage all departmental users and sysadmins from upgrading any machines to Leopard for anything other than testing purposes. There are a couple of fairly serious flaws with how Leopard interacts with our environment. Most notably, Leopard doesn’t work with
coeus or project, our file servers. Our support engineer at Apple has been notified, and we’ll be working with him to solve the problem.

Also of note, there are a number of serious bugs in Leopard’s X11 server. It’s my understanding that Apple’s X11 developers are working very hard on fixing them. Until an update is released, anyone who uses X11 on Mac OS should hold off on an upgrade.

We realize holding off on an upgrade can be frustrating—several of us in IRIS use MacOS as our primary desktop. Once we have solutions to the highest priority problems with Leopard, help@eecs will be able to answer your questions.

For those of you who may have already upgraded and find yourselves in dire straits, the following may help. The below information is highly technical in nature, and this is all the help we can offer right now:

The file servers—if you’re comfortable using the command line, the smbclient utility does appear to still work with the NetApps, assuming you have a kerberos ticket. Of course, if you’re comfortable with the command line, it’s probably easier to just ssh/sftp to argus or your favorite shell account machine. Syntax for smbclient is…

smbclient //coeus.eecs.berkeley.edu/USERID -k

where USERID is your login, like ‘fraser’ or ‘adj’, and the ‘-k’ is to do kerberos authentication. Remember, smbclient does not mount the remote volume, it just gives you an ftp-like interface for transfering files to/from it.

X11—Among other problems, it does not work with Spaces. They’ve upgraded the codebase to X.org’s X11R7.2, but it looks like little-to-no QA was done. The following mailing list archive (look at the posts over the past couple of days) contains some information from one of Apple’s X11 developers, including totally unofficial patches:

[http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/](http://lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/)
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Print Hardware Fix

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The windows print server is having hardware problems. One of the drives in the mirror had died and needs to be replaced, I will be doing that this morning. This should happen with out interrupting the service.

Resolved as of 2007-10-31 17:42:00

Server Patching on Wed, 10/10, 3pm-5pm

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Microsoft will release their patches for the month on Tuesday, Oct 9th, 2007.

HERMES, PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will be down for patching *Wednesday, Oct 10th*, from *3:00pm to 5:00pm*.

macserver.eecs.berkeley.edu, which hosts the Mac software warehouse, will be down for maintenance at this time as well.

We are testing out patch management solutions. PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will reboot again at *3am* on *Oct 11th*.

Resolved as of 2007-10-10 17:00:00

Matlab/Mathematica License Server Down

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The EECS license server for Matlab and Mathematica licenses unexpectedly went offline at about 1:30pm. Staff are investigating.

We will post further information as it becomes available. Until the license service is restored, users will not be able to check out departmental licenses for Matlab or for Mathematica.
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New Mailing List Service

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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.