coxeter and sphere updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday June 17, 2015

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, June 17, 2015 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.

At this time it appears that the mail and web servers will not have to be rebooted.

Projector in BA6180 (the Boardroom)

The projector in BA6180 (the Boardroom) is now working through the connections in the table.

Only the On, Off, Volume Up, and Volume Down buttons on the Extron MLC 52 Basic MediaLink Controller in the table are used, and only the HDMI connection is available (the distance was too far for reliable transmission over a VGA cable).  Note that the On and Off buttons need to be pressed for about a half-second to take effect (but please do not press too hard, the panel could be broken), and that it takes about 30 seconds for the projector to warm up when turned on.

The system only accepts HDMI input but there is a cable, available at the front desk, for converting VGA signals to HDMI (a USB connection, attached to the cable, is also needed to power the conversion).

extron-web

There is no on-screen feedback when the Volume Up or Volume Down keys are used, but the volume is changing for the projector’s speakers.

Server updates on 2015jun03 were successful

The departmental servers are working fine after the updates.

Updates at 4:15pm on Wednesday June 3, 2015

The departmental servers coxeter, sphere, and the mail, web, share, ptr, and blog/wiki servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, June 3, 2015 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5:00pm.

Power outage in Bahen

There was an unscheduled power outage in Bahen late on Wednesday night (May 27).  After power was restored to our servers we were able to bring them back up in the morning of May 28.

Server updates on 2015apr23 were successful

The departmental servers are working fine after the updates.  The mail server reboot was postponed so email was not affected this time.

MATHEMATICA updated to latest stable version (10.0.2)

MATHEMATICA has been updated to 10.0.2 (the latest stable version) on sphere.  Type mathematica (for a graphical interface) or math (for a command-line interface) on sphere to access this new version.

MATLAB updated to latest stable version (R2015a)

MATLAB has been updated to R2015a (the latest stable version) on sphere.  Type matlab on sphere to access this new version.

Improving the response times for the programs “kate” and “kile”

If you wish to run kate (an advanced text editor for KDE) or kile (an integrated LaTeX environment) on coxeter (say, on a file called file.tex) then it is best to use a command line of the form:

kate --graphicssystem native file.tex

and

kile --graphicssystem native file.tex

The latest major update to the KDE graphics system has caused those programs to run quite slowly without those options.

New network switch installation and server updates on 2015mar18 were successful

The new departmental network switch was installed and appears to be working well.

The departmental servers also seem to be working fine after the updates.