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2013

  • 2 min read

Email service changes

In an effort to increase the quality of our offered services, the Board of Directors is phasing out email services. Over the next few months, a two-phase plan will give our members time to retrieve their data and transition to alternatives.

Note: Email virtual hosts for groups are not affected by Phase 2.

Phase 1: Forward-only


Effective Sunday, October 20

OCF currently supports a few ways to read mail received by username@ocf.berkeley.edu:
  1. Forwarding to another email address
  2. IMAP, POP (e.g., Thunderbird, Apple Mail)
  3. Web-based email interface (webmail)
  4. Command-line clients (e.g., mutt)
On October 20, OCF email service will become forward-only. OCF will no longer support the storage and access of mail on OCF servers (2-4).

If you do not already use forwarding, create a .forward file in your home directory (~/.forward) containing the email address to forward to. Otherwise an attempt will be made to use the email address from CalNet (if publicly listed) or provided when the account was originally requested.

 After this date, email that is stored on OCF servers (including files in /var/mail, ~/Mail, ~/mail) will be deleted. If you need assistance migrating your stored email to another service, please visit staff hours.

Note: No email was deleted.

Phase 2: Email service discontinued


Effective date TBA

At a future date (yet to be determined), email service will become internal. We will cease to support email sent from a username@ocf.berkeley.edu email address to an address from another domain (e.g., recepient@example.com). Similarly, we will reject mail from other domains sent to recepient@ocf.berkeley.edu.

There are two relevant exceptions to this policy:
  • Groups with email virtual hosts (@group.berkeley.edu) will not be affected
  • Forwarding of email sent from within the OCF

We arrived at this decision after much debate and deliberation. We found that the vast majority of current students forward their OCF email and do not send emails from this address. In addition, we face a significant spam email problem requiring constant policing of email sent and received on our mail server. Accordingly, we decided to focus our volunteer efforts on different services.

We welcome feedback in person during our weekly meetings on Thursdays at 8pm in the California Conference Room (across the lab).
  • 1 min read

Email (sandstorm), web (death), and printhost server maintenance tonight

There will be maintenance on the email, webserver, and printhost servers tonight. More info will be provided along the way.

Update 10:10pm: email server is under maintenance now.

Update 10:40pm: email maintenance has finished successfully.

Update 11:05pm: web server under maintenance now.

Update 11:36pm: web server maintenance has finished successfully.

Update 11:55pm: printhost (as well as the printers) are having issues.

  • 1 min read

Richard Stallman: A Free Digital Society

Join UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff in Soda Hall for a lecture on A Free Digital Society by the software developer and software freedom activist Richard Stallman.

Dr. Stallman founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. He is the original author of Emacs, GCC, and the General Public License. GNU software, with a Linux kernel, is used on millions of computers today.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Date: Saturday, November 16, 2013
Time: 5:00 p.m. Attendance is first-come, first-served.
Venue: 306 Soda (HP Auditorium) 100 Genetics and Plant Biology Building

More details: ocf.io/rms

Update: Venue has changed to 100 GPB due to overwhelming demand.

  • 1 min read

MySQL database maintenance

From 1:00am to 3:00am, there will be maintenance on the MySQL database. More info will be provided along the way.

Update 3:30am: maintenance is still progressing after taking longer than expected during the initial backup phase. more updates later.

Update 4:20am: maintenance has been completed successfully.

  • 1 min read

SSH server (tsunami) maintenance

The ssh server will be restarted for maintenance over the next hour.

Update 6:30am: This work has been completed successfully.

  • 1 min read

Printing service changes

As an organization managed and operated entirely by student volunteers, we don't have the financial resources, equipment, or facility space to sustain our current and projected levels of printing demand.

We have already implemented a number of measures to manage our levels of printing, including:
  • draft-quality printing
  • third-party toner
  • 30-page daily limit
Despite measures, we estimate that we will print over 500,000 pages this semester and thus exceed our planned printing budget. While they have been largely successful, the savings have been offset by increases in membership without an increase in funding or student volunteers.

In addition to the budgetary challenges, our printing equipment is not designed for our current levels of printing and require constant repair due to frequent toner leaks, which reduce reliability and print quality.

In an effort to reduce costs and increase reliability, the OCF Board of Directors has introduced a weekday printing limit of 10 pages/day. The existing 30 page/day limit will currently continue on weekends. OCF may make additional changes to printing policy this semester and future semesters to manage increasing printing demand.

We recognize that this will greatly inconvenience students who do not own or otherwise have access to a printer, and we hope that this will encourage the university to consider affordable alternatives. We welcome feedback in person during our weekly meetings on Thursdays at 8pm in the California Conference Room (across the lab).

See the October 3 Board of Directors meeting minutes details on the decision and the alternatives that we considered.
  • 1 min read

Unexpected downtime - campus-wide power failure


OCF is experiencing unexpected downtime due to a widespread power failure on the UC Berkeley campus.  We expect power to be restored by tomorrow (Oct 1st) morning and our services should be back up by noon tomorrow.

Update Oct 1 9:47am: All services back up.

  • 1 min read

Shell rc file changes

Due to upgrades of our servers to better supported systems, we will not be supporting old rc file locations. Please update your shell rc files accordingly. Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

The list below shows where the new files are located. (e.g. /folder/a --> /folder/b means /folder/a is now located at /folder/b)

/opt/local/environment --> /opt/ocf/share/environment
/usr/local/environment --> /opt/ocf/share/environment
/opt/ocf/environment --> /opt/ocf/share/environment
/usr/ucb/whoami --> /usr/bin/whoami

  • 1 min read

New Debian Wheezy ssh.ocf (tsunami) server

On Monday, September 2, the existing ssh.ocf server will be upgraded from Debian Squeeze to Debian Wheezy. More updates will be posted as that date approaches.

EDIT 9/2/13 2:04pm: upgrade happening now

EDIT 4:17pm: progressing along, should be done within the next hour

EDIT 5:02pm: the upgrade has been completed. Please contact us if there are any issues.

  • 1 min read

Shorter URLs for web hosting

In our last blog post, we announced that ocf.berkeley.edu points to the web server, meaning that you can now leave off the "www" in www.ocf.berkeley.edu.

We're now announcing ocf.io as a shorter alternative to ocf.berkeley.edu, "in beta".

In addition, if you leave off the tilde ("~") for an account name, it will be added.

In other words, the following are shorthand forms of the canonical form http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~account :

  • ocf.io/account
  • ocf.io/~account
  • ocf.berkeley.edu/account
  • ocf.berkeley.edu/~account
  • www.ocf.berkeley.edu/account

The shorthand URL forms are 302 redirected ("moved permanently") to the canonical URL.