Csadmin

If there is a systems emergency during non-business hours, please contact the emergency hotline (434-982-2271); there is contact information on the hotline for reaching staff at home if no information is posted there. If you aren't sure what constitutes an emergency, please click here.

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Power4 rebuilt - 4/3/08

Power4 is now running our Ubuntu 7.10 server testing build (see below) - please log on and let us know if you run into any problems.

Ubuntu 7.10 Testing Build Released - VOLUNTEERS WANTED - 4/3/08

Over the past few months, we have been evaluating alternatives to Fedora for our official Linux distribution. The Fedora Legacy Project, which maintained security updates for deprecated versions of Fedora, disbanded in the spring of 2007. At that point, to keep our Linux boxes up-to-date would have required rebuilds of every Linux machine every 13 months or less - a huge management burden, not to mention an inconvenience to the end user.

We considered several alternative distributions, and the best fit for the needs of our user base and for us appears to be Ubuntu. It has a large, active support community, industry acceptance, a strong track record for stability, and it offers automated deployment tools that facilitate the build process. It's also the distribution that has been most frequently requested in the last few years from our students who wish to administer their own machines. Most of all, in addition to bleeding-edge releases every 6 months, they also long-term support (LTS) releases every 2 years that are supported for three, which solves our original predicament!

We have set up desktop and server testing builds for i386 for the current bleeding-edge release, Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), which will be most similar to the next LTS release, 8.04 (Hardy Heron), due out on April 24th. We're ready for our build to enter the testing phase - we've run the desktop build on our own machines for about a month and would love to have volunteers to help us test. If you'd like to try out the desktop build, send mail to root and we'll arrange to install it for you (note that, if Ubuntu is selected as our next official distro, we'll discontinue support of the 7.10 testing build soon after our 8.04 build is ready, so be prepared for a reinstall of your Linux partition twice in two months). The server build is up on power4 - please hop on and take a look. We would appreciate any feedback you have!

Archive Available Again - 4/2/08

Archive is back in the general compute pool.

Linux Update Mirror Unavailable - 3/6/08

Our local Fedora and Ubuntu distribution mirror, linuxupdate.cs.virginia.edu, is down for system maintenance. Attempts to update or install packages via package management tools (yum, pirut, apt, dpkg, Synaptic, etc.) will fail during this time. We expect it to be back up by the afternoon of 3/13.

Samba (CIFS) Restart on Apollo & Athena - 3/9/08

Because of the Daylight Savings Time shift this weekend, all Samba processes on Apollo and Athena required a restart to pick up the clock shift from the OS. Users should more or less seamlessly have their sessions reconnect. It may be necessary to re-map the network drive using Windows Explorer (not IE), or, re-mounting if using smbfs.

PHP Configuration Changes - 1/24/08

We changed two configuration options in PHP in order to improve reliability and security - the first is turning register_globals off and the second is turning off external URL file opening mechanisms (for example, using fopen() with a URL). Some PHP code running on the webserver may need to be modified to function properly after this change. Please see the PHP documentation on register_globals as well as a quick explanation of how to fix code depending on register_globals at ITC.

By e-mail: root@cs.virginia.edu
Emergency hotline: 982-2271 (What constitutes an emergency?)
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