Computing Service Newsletter 236 (April 2008)

General News

• Gerald Foster
• Changes to the CS Newsletter
• The new ISSS
• Increasing the resilience of UCS services
• Photography and Illustration Service
• Apple Store
• Videoconferencing
• Backing up your files
• Cancellation of student accounts

Gerald Foster

The Computing Service regrets to announce the death on April 2nd 2008 of Gerald Foster, Manager of the Small Systems Workstation Group. Gerald was well-known to the IT community within the University as manager of the PWF Managed Cluster Service.

Changes to the CS Newsletter

With the advent of the Computing Service News Service at http://ucsnews.csx.cam.ac.uk/, we are currently reviewing the purpose and style of the Computing Service Newsletter. We plan to circulate those who are on the mailing list for notification of new Newsletters, and to invite comments before final decisions are made.

The new ISSS

Information about the Information Strategy and Services Syndicate (which has taken over responsibility for the Computing Service from the IT Syndicate) is now available at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/committee/isss/

The Chair of the new Syndicate is Professor Steve Young, Engineering Department (sjy@eng.cam.ac.uk), and the Secretary (from 1 May) is Mr. Ian Troupe, Senior Assistant Registrary, Secretariat (idt21@admin.cam.ac.uk). The full membership is listed at http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/committee/isss/about/members.html

Increasing the resilience of UCS services [headline article]

The Computing Service has entered into an agreement with Redstone, a networking company that has a base of operations in Cambridge, to co-locate some UCS equipment in order to improve the resilience of our major services.

We are now renting 6 racks worth of space (or more relevantly 18KW of power) from them, as well as 4 diversely routed fibre pairs for networking between their data centre and the CUDN.The intention is to move the redundant half of most major services out there. A 10 Gbit connection was installed over the Easter Vacation, and servers are now being moved.

We hope to see improved resilience in some services this term; further work will take place over the summer.

Back to other Headlines

Photography and Illustration Service [headline article]

Philip Ball took over the management of PandIS on 2nd January 2008, following Don Manning's move to the University Library. Philip comes from Medical Photography on the Addenbrooke's site where he was Senior Medical Artist to the Clinical School for nearly 19 years, and he looks forward to the challenge that his new position brings.

PandIS has designed a 2008 year planner, including University terms and other important dates, which can be tailored to your departmental needs and produced in short runs for the same cost as a basic off-the-shelf wall planner. Contact Philip on 34393 if you would like to see a sample.

Photography and Illustration (PandIS) offers a range of services to staff and students of the University and Colleges. These primarily include

• Processing and/or developing of film, for prints, slides and/or CD
• The sale of graduation photographs and frames at Senate House
• The production (and design as required) of posters and other display material
• The use of a self-access copy camera suite
• Photography for occasions such as graduation days, balls, club and society events
• Hiring out of display boards

The department is open from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, closing for lunch between 1 and 2pm.

Back to other Headlines

Apple Store

Apple have opened a new Apple Store in the Grand Arcade. See http://www.apple.com/uk/retail/grandarcade for details of the support services that they provide including Genius Bar, Workshops, One to One and ProCare. Some of these services are free and some charged: they sometimes require reservations.

The prices displayed in the Apple Store are their retail prices, not their Education or HE prices. They will normally sell to educational customers at the standard education price. On production of a University card they can choose to meet the pricing of the HE contract if asked, but this is not automatic. The recommendation is to print out a proposal from the HE webstore at http://www.apple.com/uk/education/hied and see if the shop will then match the HE price. They will however not be able to match the 3 year extended warranty that is available from the HE webstore.

Videoconferencing

The UCS Videoconferencing Suite recently hosted fifteen pupils from Years 4 and 5 at Swavesey Village College, with their teachers. They were taking part in a multiway conference with other UK schools as part of the Festival of Social Science, the topic being sustainable food resources. The conference was technically interesting in that it included H.323 (standard IP videoconferencing) links and also bridge-links to Access Grid videoconferencing.

Backing up your files

The Hardware Support section of the Computing Service sees a regular flow of users with dead or partially-dead laptops. A number of these users report that the laptop contains their only copy of work in progress: thesis, paper or book. Some also report that the laptop has been showing signs of trouble for weeks or months, and it still has not occurred to them to make a backup copy of their work. One recent example was an student who lost nearly two years'-worth of work; specialists quoted £800 to recover the information, but in the event were unable to recover any of it.

With the advent of USB storage devices, backup is easier than it has ever been, and takes only a few mouse-clicks. Documents or data you are actively working on need to be copied to backup devices at least once a day, depending how much time you can afford to lose having to reconstruct your changes from scratch. Backup devices need to be stored separately (i.e. not in a laptop case - laptops can be stolen). See leaflet G81: CDs and other removable storage media for advice on the different removable media you can use.

Another recommended method is to keep backup copies on the PWF filestore. You can connect to this from your own machine very easily; if you are a Windows or Linux user, see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/cifs.html - for a Macintosh see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/macafp.html This route doesn't work through wireless (Lapwing) at present, nor does it work from outside Cambridge. See http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/pwf/fsaccess.html for alternative ways to get at your PWF filespace in these cases.

Beware of backing up so automatically after every change that you corrupt your working copy of a file and then backup the corrupt copy before realising. To avoid this problem, some people use one of the above methods for frequent backups and the other (or a second device) for a safety copy every few days.

Cancellation of student accounts [headline article]

This notice is addressed to all students expected to complete their studies this summer, and describes the timetable for cancelling student accounts. Students believed to be continuing to a further course are excluded; however, the data we collect is inevitably incomplete, particularly concerning certain one-year courses. See below for what to do if you are on the cancellation list and should not be.

Students cannot keep their University computing accounts after the cancellation date below; the University's email forwarding service for alumni, set up jointly by the Development Office and Management Information Services Division, may be of interest. See http://cantab.net/ for details.

Students affected

Cancellation date 14 July 2008:

• third and fourth year undergraduates, unless they are known to be following longer courses (e.g. clinical medicine and veterinary medicine, MML, MEng, MSci and some Oriental Studies students), or known to hold a conditional or unconditional offer of a postgraduate place in Cambridge.
• affiliated students completing their second year (entered the University in 2006)
• LLM and Part III Mathematics students
• final year clinical veterinary medicine students
• final year clinical medicine students
• single term and single year students who have completed their Cambridge course

Cancellation date 18 August 2008:

• students following one-year postgraduate courses scheduled to be completed by 31 July. This includes a number of MPhil courses and all Diploma courses.
• fourth year MET students
• PGCE students
• MPhil and one year students following later-finishing courses will be cancelled at a later date in the Michaelmas term.

On or shortly after the dates shown, all computing accounts belonging to students in the categories mentioned above will be cancelled on the PWF, Hermes, Raven, CUS, CUDN Dial-up service (Magpie) and VPDN. The students concerned will be notified by email to their @cam addresses during May 2008. Those who have applied to continue to a further degree will receive a message confirming that we are aware of their application and that accounts will not be cancelled, as long as the application is live at the cancellation date.

Before you leave

If you are not intending to return to Cambridge next year, please clear your filespace(s) before the dates given above, first ensuring that you have copies of any files you want to keep. Also, if you have subscribed to any mailing lists, please remember to cancel the subscription before you leave.

If you will have another email address after you leave the University (for instance the cantab.net forwarding service for alumni), you are advised to set up your new account and notify your regular correspondents of your change of address soon. You may forward mail from your Cambridge account to your new account, but this will only work until the Cambridge account is cancelled. It is regretted that mail cannot be forwarded after accounts are closed. See http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/docs/backup.html for how to make copies of your data to take away.

University Society computing resources

Please remember to arrange to transfer ownership of any society resources to the person who will be looking after them in the next academic year. See http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/socinfo/ for instructions.

Information for alumni

The following has been received from the University Development Office:

To make sure that you receive CAM, the University's alumni magazine, when you leave Cambridge please visit http://www.foundation.cam.ac.uk/ and register your details. You will also find information on the Alumni Travel Programme, the Alumni Weekend and other benefits available to alumni on the web site.

If you are staying in Cambridge

If you are going to be away during the summer vacation, please unsubscribe or suspend mail from mailing lists; see Information Sheet IS12: Hermes Email: Forwarding (redirection) and vacation messages. You may also like to consult IS13: Reading and sending email when away from Cambridge, and see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/away/ which describes actions you should consider taking before you leave Cambridge for the summer. If you are a CUS user, make sure you have moved everything you need from CUS before it closes down at the beginning of October.

If you expect to return to the University in October but are not on our list of continuing students (and therefore receive a message warning you about cancellation), then when you receive the message about cancellation, please fill in the web form at the appropriate page:

If you have not yet finished your degree:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/request/contstud.html

If you are returning to the University for further study:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/request/newpg.html

If you are joining the University or a College as a member of staff:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/request/stud2staff.html

Back to other Headlines

Next Section