TECH STAFF NEWS – January 2004

 

New Tape Backup System

In June 2003 the department purchased a new backup device to increase the speed and reliability with which the departmental AFS data is archived. Our previous backup device was an HP SureStore DAT40 drive which was replaced by the new HP StorageWorks Ultrium 460 drive.

The Ultrium 460 drive supersedes the current SureStore DAT drive and offers a much improved storage capacity. The backup capacity per tape increases by a factor of 10 from 20/40 Gigs to 200/400 Gigs per tape (uncompressed/compressed capacity).

This increase in backup capacity will enable us to keep pace with the ever growing storage demands of our users.


Graduate Student Workstations

 

This past summer the department purchased 22 new graduate student machines.  These machines came configured with:

·        Pentium-4 2.4GHz processors

·        512 MB of PC2700 DDR memory

·        Built-in Gigabit Ethernet

·        Built-in sound

·        40 Gig hard drives (with 8MB cache)

·        GeForce 4MX 8x AGP graphics cards with 64MB of memory

·        Optical mice & multimedia keyboards

 

We anticipate replacing low end graduate student machines in the near future.  Old graduate student machines are refurbished by the tech staff by harvesting memory and other components and we rebuild these machines for use by our undergraduates.

 

 

 

Fight SPAM with Spam Assassin!

 

The department mail server has a tool for identifying spam called SpamAssassin. Instead of just using keywords, SpamAssassin uses a list of tests on the headers, and body of the message to generate a score on how likely a message is spam. Our installation is opt-in, which means that if you want to take advantage of the features of SpamAssassin, you need to follow the steps outlined in: http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jo2y/spam-filtering.html

 

 

 

 

 

Eli Lilly Conference Room Now Available

 

The Eli Lilly Conference Room, 6106 Sennott Square, is available for use by faculty, staff and students. Use of the room must be scheduled in advance with our department receptionist, Kathleen Allport, (6135 Sennott Square, allport@cs.pitt.edu, 412-624-8490).

 

Features of the room include:

- A Polycom Viewstation 4000 video conferencing CODEC with IP and ISDN connections. This unit is also a conference bridge, allowing connections to up to four other sites using any combination of IP and ISDN.

- Two 42" plasma displays

- Two video cameras with pan, tilt and zoom control

- Connections for laptop computers

- Document camera

- S-VHS VCR

- DVD player

A SMART board is also installed and will be functional as soon as a PC and projector are purchased.  Documentation on the facilities is available in the conference room.

 

If you need assistance in using the new Eli Lilly conference room, please send an e-mail to tech@cs.pitt.edu so that we may schedule a tech staff member to help you.




AFS Bug Necessitates Changes to Workstations

 

On Saturday, January 10th at 13:38:03 UTC, the UNIX date value rolled over from 0x3fffffff to 0x40000000.  While some people celebrated “New Bit Day”, AFS users certainly had no reason to party because a bug that has apparently been in the AFS code since its beginning got triggered.  This prevented the AFS Ubik database servers from electing a quorum, which forced us to update our database server software immediately. This also forced the shutdown of the old database servers on the old network (lurch, mortician and thing).  The CellServDB files on all of the department-maintained UNIX systems were updated automatically. Windows systems, however, must have their afsdcell.ini files updated manually. Anyone who is experiencing problems accessing their files via AFS should contact tech@cs.pitt.edu as soon as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

File Server Crash

 

Shortly after noon on Monday, January 26th, we experienced a severe failure of one of our main AFS servers, the IBM Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. This system was configured with six 36GB and fourteen 18GB drives configured in four separate RAID-5 arrays. One of the 36GB drives failed. When a drive fails in a RAID-5 array, the array is supposed to continue to operate in degraded mode. For some reason, this failed drive caused all fourteen drives representing two RAID-5 arrays in the expansion cabinet to go into "defunct" mode. While trying to recover the arrays, the RAID controller configuration was lost, rendering the entire server inoperable and taking about 200GB of AFS volumes offline.

We immediately started restoring users' home volumes from the backup tapes onto another server with extra free space. This is a slow process, and it took three days to restore all of the critical volumes.  If any users experience "Connection timed out" when trying to access files in AFS space, they should first issue the "fs checkvolumes"command.  If that doesn't work, please e-mail tech@cs.pitt.edu ASAP.

 

 

 

Network Center to get additional Air Conditioning

 

The air conditioning unit originally provided for the Network Center (room 6206) has only one sixth the capacity of what we had requested.  So we’ve been unable to fully utilize the room.  We’ve been using the Maintenance Center (room 6204), as an additional temporary machine room.

 

We expect to have a new A/C unit in the Network Center by the end of February.

 

The delivery of the unit itself is expected on February 2nd or 3rd.  You may have noticed installation of the chilled water pipes on the 6th floor over the past few weeks.

 

Once the new A/C unit is operational, we anticipate moving our servers out of the Maintenance Center (room 6204) so that we may make better use of the Maintenance Center.

 

 

 

New News Server for Computer Science Department Newsgroups

 

There is a new news server that supports local “CS” newsgroups.  Configure your newsreader to use news.cs.pitt.edu and you may subscribe to such groups as cs.talks, cs.grads, cs.announce and more.  Note that this news server is not part of the USENET, nor do newsgroups on this server propagate to other news servers.  Currently connections to the server are restricted to pitt.edu hosts.  We plan to add remote authentication later.

 

 

Department to support Macintosh platform

 

There’s sufficient interest in the Macintosh platform to warrant supporting it in our department.  The department will buy O/S licenses and application software such as MAC office.  Please contact tech@cs.pitt.edu if you are interested in this program.

 

 

Red Hat License in your future?

 

We understand that CSSD’s Software Licensing group is negotiating an agreement with Red Hat on their new licensed operating system.  More on this as details become available.

 

 

Don’t forget about the University’s Free On-line Software

 

Faculty, staff and students of the University of Pittsburgh can download a free copy of Norton Antivirus (which is licensed for 1 year and can be renewed for free) by visiting http://technology.pitt.edu/software/fac_norton.html

 

Check out all the available titles by logging on with your CSSD username and password at http://software.pitt.edu

 

 

 

 

Mydoom virus making the rounds

 

Latest information on the Mydoom virus may be found at http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-2004-01.html