IRIS

PP-CS is calling for non-critical computer systems in room 165 to shutdown on Wednesday, March 23, for repairs to the cooling tower system in Cory Hall. We ask you to volunteer to shut down your computer equipment for the hours of 8am – 4pm. We believe we can keep the room cool (if we have enough volunteers) for those who can not shut down their computer equipment or servers. It is expected that the ambient temperature will rise during this repair from 70 deg. F. to 80 deg. F. in room 165.

Also, PP-CS will be testing some standby cooling this Thursday, March 17, in room 165 and will require no action on your part.

Please advise if you will be able to help us by shutting down your equipment. If we can not shutdown any equipment we will likely reschedule a full shutdown later this year.

Please note this is not related to the industrial water shutdown on Tuesday, March 22. This industrial water shutdown should not affect room 165 cooling system.

Thank You,

Scott McNally
[Read more…] about Cory Cooling Curtailment

In order to comply with the recent campus IT security policies (http://itpolicy.berkeley.edu), some changes will be made to the main EECS outgoing email relays. Please customize your settings accordingly. If you have further questions, please contact help@eecs.

1. If you use “gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu” as your outgoing email relay, these changes will not impact you. If you are not, we strongly suggest that you update the outgoing email relay to “gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu”. Please note that most ISPs have started blocking port 25, so if you have problem sending email via “gateway.eecs.berkeley.edu”, the helpdesk can assist you.
2. Effective 3/29, if your outgoing email relay is “smtp.eecs.berkeley.edu”, authenticated relay will start. If your client (outlook, netscape, thunderbird, etc.) uses ‘secure connections’ “when possible”, you might see a warning about mismatch of SSL certificate (which you can ignore). If you use Eudora, this mismatch cannot be ignored, and you will need to change your outgoing relay and might need to re-import the Entrust certificate chain. Again, the helpdesk can assist you.
3. Effective 4/26, only authenticated email relays will be accepted by our outgoing email relay servers. If your client (outlook, netscape, etc.) does not have the ‘secure connection’ set, please set it to “when possible” to allow authentication.
4. If any servers within EECS that use “smtp.eecs.berkeley.edu” as a relay server, this will also cease to function after 4/26. Please have your system administrator make the appropriate changes. More information will be sent in the near future.

The Entrust certificate is attached.

Attachment:  entrustchaincert.crt

On Wednesday, March 16, from approximately 7pm-10pm, IDSG will be upgrading the master LDAP server, ldapmaster.eecs.berkeley.edu. During that time, attempts to write to LDAP will fail. None of the read-only slaves will be offline, and as such, most LDAP-dependent services should continue to function.

The following should be the list of things that won’t work during the upgrade.

• LDAP password changes (either through the helpdesk password reset webpage, or the IMAP webmail client on imap.eecs)
• Roster account creation/modification/deletion
• Ports database changes

NIS password changes (ssh’ing to passwd.eecs) and Windows AD password changes will continue to work.

The RIS server continues to be unavailable, although IDSG has high expectations that it will be back some time this month.
Microsoft is close to solving our problem, however additional testing is needed. Install disks continue to be available at the help desk, thank you all for your patience.

The Instructional UNIX file server suffered a hardware failure around
10am Saturday March 5th. Please see the Instructional web site for the latest updates.
[Read more…] about Instructional UNIX home dirs and email are inaccessible

The department’s SMTP relay, gateway.EECS.Berkeley.Edu, accepts incoming connections on the SMTP Submission port
(port 587).

Most of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are now blocking or
filtering the default SMTP port (25) at their network borders, making
the use of gateway.eecs impossible for some home users. Those who are
being affected by their ISP’s blocks may find relief by using this
alternate port 587.

See the IRIS Software FAQ for instructions on how to configure your email client.

[Read more…] about Alternate SMTP port available on gateway.EECS

The network switches on the 6th floor of Soda Hall and the 3rd floor of Soda Hall will be rebooted for code upgrades on March 3rd (Thursday) at 7:30am. The switches would be down for about 1 or 2 minutes.

Only users in Soda Hall 3rd floor and 6th floor should notice any loss of connection.

IRIS’ general UNIX login server argus.EECS.Berkeley.EDU is scheduled for routine maintenance.

argus.EECS.Berkeley.EDU will be shutdown and rebooted Wednesday 3/2 at 5pm.

We expect argus will be off-line for less than 10 minutes.

Please make your plans accordingly.

Microsoft will release their patches for the month on March 8th. HERMES, PRINT, RIS and WINSWW will be down for patching the following Wednesday, March 9th, from 3:00 – 5:00pm.
[Read more…] about Server Patching Mar 09, 2005

There is a new virus out in the wild. Please do not open any files with a .zip that purports to be from the department. We do not send e-mails with attachments.

Please update your virus scanning programs accordingly. The departmental virus scanners will be updated as soon as an update is made available.
[Read more…] about New Virus Info