Quota Upgrades
We're currently in the process of upgrading user quotas. Quotas will be bumped to a minimum of 250Mb for faculty, staff, and graduate students. Everyone else is being bumped to a 100Mb minimum.
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We're currently in the process of upgrading user quotas. Quotas will be bumped to a minimum of 250Mb for faculty, staff, and graduate students. Everyone else is being bumped to a 100Mb minimum.
The master LDAP directory server, and our Identity Managment System "hub" will be down during the morning of Saturday, August 20, 2005 for software and hardware upgrades.
During this time, certain MyUMBC functionality relating to account maintenance will be unavailable. Functions affected include:
And others -- basically, anything housed on the "accounts.umbc.edu" or "webadmin.umbc.edu" websites. Other services, such as email access & delivery, UNIX shell accounts and Blackboard will continue to be available during this time.
The outage will begin as early as 3am, and last until 12 noon at the latest.
Please check this website for further updates and status.
Blackboard production was upgraded this morning 8/19 and is now running 6.2.3.6-hf3
I moved the listproc Apache server from the local one to the "Uber" build 003. This was done to bring listproc in-line with the rest of our web servers and also because I needed FastCGI for testing Sympa, which is a possible replacement for the old CREN ListProc software currently in use for UMBC mailing lists.
Our scheduled outage to upgrade our LDAP directory service was a complete success. Well within our downtime window, the master directory server was upgraded from Sun iPlanet 4.16 to Sun Java Directory Server 5.2, and moved to new hardware. Our directory replicas were also upgraded at the same time; these are still running on their old hardware, as we have a planned migration of these to newer systems later this year.
The new version of the Sun One Directory Server defaults to using the {SSHA} password hash format, as opposed to the old {SHA} hash. Any code that directly verifies password hashes needs to be modified appropriately. Some code to do it is included in the extended article if you need it.
With that, the KDC/LDAP password sync has been re-enabled. Had disabled it for the DS upgrade just incase we seriously horked something :)
The SGI Indy, cgi.umbc.edu has been retired. The "cgi.umbc.edu" virtual host is serving specific redirects and such as required for backwards compatibility. No longer is the server "cgi.umbc.edu" being used to run, well, cgis. Those are done from your user account ;)
If there's any wackyness, please let us know.
The Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail, USENET, and RSS client are now available in /usr/local/bin of all UMBC Linux systems which use AFS depot space (this means all GL servers and Linux lab workstations.)
These were put in place in advance of the deployment of the new UMBC Linux lab workstation build which is based on RHEL 3 Workstation.
One may run into issues executing these two apps on the current GL servers and Linux workstations due to some GTK library incompatibilities, but since these will all end up with RHEL 3 builds soon, it will not be a issue for long.
Firefox and Thunderbird are to be the default web browser and GUI-based e-mail client on the workstations, but Mozilla will still be available for those who prefer that.
The linux login servers are in the process of being upgraded to our wacky build of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3. Linux1 & 2 are complete, linux3 is currently having it's disk built and will be on-line soon. Please read on for caveats and whathaveyous.
We're currently testing "copying" the /usr/afsws & /usr/k5 trees, via cfengine, to local drives instead of linking to them in AFS. This is a precursor to taking advantage of using shared Kerberos & AFS libraries instead of always statically linking these apps. This will make updates to Kerberos for bugs & security much easier, as applications which use them will not need to be rebuilt. In case of AFS service troubles, applications which make use of these libraries will continue to be available -- as their dependant libraries are not mounted in AFS.
A small (hopefully unnoticable) change was made to the cfengine configuration, moving the disable action before the copy. This allows the removal of the /usr/afsws & /usr/k5 symlinks before the recursive copy operation. This allows for a continued "simple" afs client installation and configuration (by just creating the links), and allows cfengine to do the heavy lifting once the machine is finally configured.
Right now I'm currently testing this under linux only -- I'll expand it to the platforms we care about (solaris sparc & solaris x86) next week.
In hopes of trying to clear up a bunch of constantly failing servers I removed bb-mig, cgi, cyclone from the backup rotation. Waiting to hear back from networks on a bunch of their servers.
Updated pine on linux with a new version of the maildir driver that deals better with interrupted system calls; the previous version had a problem on RHEL3, which caused it to crash periodically if there was a signal interrupting the read() system call that read in message contents.
Will probably update it every where else later, this is just where we were seeing the problem.
Mathematica has been upgraded to version 5.2 on Solaris Sparc/x86, Irix, and Linux.
spice3, the circuit simulation application has been deprecated due to the existing binaries for it (circa 1999) being no longer compatible with the new RHEL3 build the GL servers use. Unfortunately, this is a incompatibility which we cannot rectify directly.
A replacement has been found in the form a of ngspice. If you are a user of spice3, please consult the ngspice website on how to use it and convert your spice3 programs to ngspice.
GNU GCC 3.4.4 has relplaced version 3.2.1 as the standard C, C++ and FORTRAN compiler on all Linux and Solaris servers which use AFS depot for /usr/local contents.
No problems should be encountered with this upgrade, but if you do run into one, be sure to file a ticket with the Helpdesk or email systems@umbc.edu.
The Weather function in Webmail has been disabled. It pulls its data from a NOAA website which apparently underwent a large change recently, preventing the Weather function from collecting data correctly. Until further notice, this function has been deemed superfluous to Webmail's purpose and has been disabled.
It may return at a later date, but there is no guarantee of that happening. It's a very low-priority thing, especially at this time of year.
This page contains all entries posted to OIT SysCore in August 2005. They are listed from oldest to newest.
July 2005 is the previous archive.
September 2005 is the next archive.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.