Latest sys-admin news

Wordpress upgraded to 3.8

23 December 2013

The instance of wordpress used for http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/news/ has been upgraded to 3.8. Please report any problems to sys-admin.

DNSSEC for cl.cam.ac.uk

15 November 2013

On Monday 18th November 2013 we plan to add a DS RR for cl.cam.ac.uk to the cam.ac.uk zone. This will mean that resolvers using DNSSEC will check our information, and ignore it if the information does not have a valid signature. Apart from making our information more secure, it also has the ability to take cl....

Filer running slowly

18 September 2013

The filer is running slowly at the moment. This is because we're copying the entire filesystem to the replacement machine. The ultimate goal is to make everything faster, but in the short term we have to suffer some pain.

Purge of legacy automount information

17 April 2013

It is believed that the last systems using the old "indirect" autofs LDAP tables have been shut down or moved to use "direct" filer mounts, so the information is no longer included in the LDAP data. If anyone observes failure of the automount system (rather than missing krb5 tickets) please report the machine...

Xen Server problems - please report anomalies

24 July 2012

We have had a number of problems with one of our Xen pools. If any VMs appear to be behaving oddly, please contact sys-admin.

A dom0 (actual machine which hosts VMs) had problems, so was taken out of service and replaced with a hot-spare. One VM (only!) appears to have problems running on the dom0,...

CentOS5 (Linux server) network service problems.

24 July 2012

A Redhat package problem caused CentOS 5 machines (Linux Servers) to loose access to certain network services. One of our two mail servers may have rejected email between 04:15 and 04:30, when the problem was spotted and the failing MTA was taken out of service.

A script was run to fix all effected...

DNS resolvers now validating

26 May 2012

The CL DNS resolvers have DNSSEC validation enabled. Please report any DNS problems to sys-admin.

Remote backups resumed

8 February 2012

The regular remote backups that were suspended on 30th January have now resumed. In particular home directories are now up to date on the remote server and should continue to be backed up hourly.

Some snapshots with non-standard names will remain on the local filer for about another week.

IPv6 address changes

8 February 2012

There has recently been a change to the IPv6 address allocations used in the University, though at present this affects relatively few people. The reason for the change is that the original allocation to Cambridge was not thought to be large enough; a larger allocation was subsequently obtained but this entails...

Problem with remote backups

1 February 2012

Since the morning of Monday 30th January, we have had a problem with the offsite backup system; a number of filesystems, including the one containing user home directories, are not being copied to the offsite server.

The problem began when I was persuaded, somewhat against my better judgement, to delete...

Wordpress upgraded to 3.8

DNSSEC for cl.cam.ac.uk

Filer running slowly

Purge of legacy automount information

Xen Server problems - please report anomalies

CentOS5 (Linux server) network service problems.

DNS resolvers now validating

Remote backups resumed

IPv6 address changes

Problem with remote backups

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