Computing Service

Computing Service Newsletters

Computing Service Newsletter 235 (January 2008)

Central Services News

Streaming Media Service

Considerable work continues to go into the pilot streaming media service. During its pilot phase we have been very grateful for bug reports from a number of users, which are either being addressed in the pilot directly or being taken into account for the specification of the final service. There is considerable pressure for the Service to deliver a fully supported facility in this area, but it is important that time is taken to monitor usage, performance and obtain feedback concerning the features and facilities required if the final result is to be fit for purpose over the long term.

The next version is expected to be released by October 2008.

CUS closure

Users are reminded that, as announced in previous Newsletters, the Central Unix Service will close down on 1 October 2008. The intention is that the majority of the functions of the CUS should be consolidated into other services, including an enhanced PWF Linux service.

The Service has already ceased to issue new CUS accounts. The remaining schedule will be as follows:

  • 1 October 2008: CUS will be closed down. Email addressed to CRSid@cus.cam.ac.uk will be redirected to CRSid@cam.ac.uk, and web requests to http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~CRSid/ will be redirected to http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/CRSid/
  • 1 October 2010: mail and web forwarding will cease.

Mail users with .forward files should note that these will not be effective once CUS has closed down; the mail forwarding to @cam addresses after 1 October 2008 will be all-or-nothing, and any filtering will have to be done at the destination. Users will be able to request to have their forwarding turned off.

Advice on migrating from CUS has been published at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/unix/cusmigration.html

Any CUS user who no longer needs their CUS account (and does not require any mail forwarding) should contact ids@ucs.cam.ac.uk asking for the account to be cancelled.

  • Individual messages have been sent to all CUS users (to @cus and @cam accounts where these differ), warning of the closure. A second message will be sent out towards the end of this term.
  • As previously announced, the anonymous FTP service on CUS (providing access to ftp://ftp.cus.cam.ac.uk/pub) closed down at the end of December 2007. Non-anonymous ftp to CUS is not affected, and anything remaining in the /pub directory tree is still accessible to users logged on to CUS.
  • ARC/Info on CUS will be withdrawn on 29 March.
  • The XDMCP service is no longer available to users outside the Computing Service (there have been no such users for some time).

Closure of Pelican

The Pelican archive service closed on 1 January 2008. For advice on alternative archiving methods see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/instadmin/pelicanend.html

Requests for PWF teaching and other software for 2008-09 [headline article]

The annual notice about teaching software and other applications for use on the PWF for the next academic year will be published in The Reporter at the end of January. Requests for new applications or upgrades to existing software for all three platforms (Linux, Macintosh and Windows) should be submitted to the Computing Service by the end of Full Lent Term (Friday 14 March 2008).

The Computing Service will shortly be reviewing usage of all teaching software currently available on the PWF, and if any teaching software shows little or no usage the responsible Department will be asked whether the application is still required.

This year, all requests for application upgrades and new applications must be on a request form, and must include information such as licensing details and the date by which the application is required. The form will be published as a PDF and will appear shortly at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/swrequest.pdf

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Vista and the PWF

It was announced in earlier Newsletters that there were no plans to move the PWF onto Windows Vista before summer 2008 at the earliest. Further review suggests that there is no good reason to move on to Vista in the foreseeable future.

Users running Vista on their own machines may wish to access their PWF filespace or PWF printers remotely. Some information about access to PWF facilities from Vista machines is at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/remote/vista.html See also the CIFS service, below.

CIFS service [headline article]

The pilot CIFS service described in previous Newsletters has been running successfully for some months, and has now become a fully supported service.

The CIFS service enables you to use your PWF personal filespace (or group filespaces) directly from a non-PWF machine. When you have successfully set up your CIFS connection, your PWF filespace will appear as just another network device, and can be used in exactly the same way as any local filing system (like your CD drive or local hard disk). It is therefore easy and convenient to use the PWF for safety copies of work in progress, for instance, and for files which you may want to access from several different locations within the CUDN. For more details see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/remote/cifs.html

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Hardware upgrades on the PWF

During the Christmas Vacation both Titan Teaching Rooms and the Phoenix Teaching Room have been upgraded with Dell Optiplex 745s, and the upgrade to Dell 20in monitors was completed.

PWF filestore

As reported in the last Newsletter, the PWF filestore was moved to new hardware in October; some 20.5 million files, totalling some 1.5TB of data, were moved during the transfer work over the weekend of 13/14 October.

The new filestore consists of two IBM DS4800 systems, associated Fibre Channel SAN switches and a management server. It supports the user filespaces hosted on the four PWF Home servers and the group spaces on PWF-SHARED, and provides a net capacity of 7.8TB, 3.9TB on each of the two IBM storage systems. Currently, about 3.5TB has been allocated for user filespaces and 1TB, a substantial increase, for the UX volume. The content transferred included all users' personal filespaces (Home Directories) and all group filespaces (on the UX volume) as well as ancillary storage.

Following the major increase in capacity for group filespaces, the quota for these has been increased from 60 Mb to 250 Mb.

Passwords on the PWF [headline article]

In the Summer 2007 Newsletter it was reported that we were making some technical changes to the way PWF passwords are handled. The changes affected only a very few PWF Macintosh users.

Later this term, on a date to be announced shortly, we intend to complete the process with a further change which will mean that PWF passwords when used on a Macintosh are subject to a 31-character limit, rather than an 8 character one. They will become case-sensitive, needing to be typed in the same case as they were set, when used on Macs and will also be more secure.

Once this change has taken place, a small group of users may need to reset their PWF passwords before using a Macintosh for the first time. This group should not include anyone whose PWF password has been set or reset since 20 Aug 2007.

Notice of the change will be given via the PWF Message of the Day and the CS News Service at http://ucsnews.csx.cam.ac.uk/

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The title of this document is: Computing Service Newsletter 235: Central Services News
URL: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/newsletter/2008/nl235/central.html