Latest sys-admin news

Migrating the filer to a new IP address - second stage

31 March 2010

On 22nd February I wrote about the start of a campaign to the migrate the NetApp filer "elmer" to a new IP address. There have been a few hiccups, but by and large the migration has gone smoothly. The vast majority of machines migrated to the new address of their own accord, and over the last few days the...

Migrating the filer to a new IP address

22 February 2010

We will shortly be making a change to the DNS to change the default IP address that is used to access the main filer, elmer. The motivation for the change is to deal with some security issues that are currently preventing the use of the latest version of the NFS protocol.

If all goes well, the change...

Web browser proxy configurations

4 February 2010

The Computing Service have recently announced that their web proxy service is to close. We have not recommended use of this service for many years, but there is still some legacy from the time when it was strongly recommended. Part of that legacy is a collection of proxy configuration files in our WWW server...

Web server logs

7 December 2009

The web server logs (subsets of which are accessible using the cl-personal-www-log command) are now being recorded in "combined" log format rather than "common". This format adds two extra fields, giving referrer and user-agent information.

Changing the name on telephones

26 October 2009

Until now, changing the name displayed on our VoIP telephones has been a big deal, involving an interaction with the telecomms office. We now have access to an experimental facility allowing us to change these strings ourselves.

If you do not like the way your name appears on your phone, you can now ask...

cron job migration from legacy servers

21 October 2009

In preparation for decommissioning our older omnipotent servers, various cron jobs are being rehomed. This should not disrupt thing, but please let sys-admin know if there appear to be problems.

The old omnipotent servers misbourne and sandy are using old hardware, old operating systems, and old Lab...

Linux kernel vulnerability tweaks

14 August 2009

Due to a Linux kernel vulnerability a number of machines have had mmap_min_addr set to 4096 or had modules.alias tweaked to disable some protocols.

If any users suspect that this may have broken things on their system, please email sys-admin@cl.cam.ac.uk

Note that ksplice fixes the problem (...

Main Lab web services use a pool

7 July 2009

There are now four web servers running the same configuration which provide a pool from which the services (www.cl.cam.ac.uk, www.tex.ac.uk, etc) can be served.

cl-condor-list and cl-condor-start commands

10 June 2009

condor users can now more easily see the state of the machines providing the condor pool, and specify new ones, using the commands cl-condor-list and cl-condor-start

Brief problem affecting certain home directories

12 May 2009

There was a period of about 20 minutes starting at about 09:30 this morning when certain users (those on "homes-1") may have had problems accessing their home directories. This was traced to a "garbage-in garbage-out" problem in the script that does the routine filer housekeeping, and corrected itself next time...

Migrating the filer to a new IP address - second stage

Migrating the filer to a new IP address

Web browser proxy configurations

Web server logs

Changing the name on telephones

cron job migration from legacy servers

Linux kernel vulnerability tweaks

Main Lab web services use a pool

cl-condor-list and cl-condor-start commands

Brief problem affecting certain home directories

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