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News from the staff team

  • 1 min read

Network issues

OCF has been experiencing network connectivity issues intermittently since Monday night. The problems appear to be due to a faulty switch generating noise on the campus end. We have been moved to a different switch temporarily while they replace the bad one. We should be moved back later today.


As of 10:18am, everything is operating as normal, and our access to the outside network seems to be fully functioning.

  • 1 min read

Network inaccessible

As of 7:59pm, OCF has lost connectivity to the campus network. OCF services will not be accessible. We are investigating the cause.

Update 8:27pm:  Connectivity restored. The cause is not known but appears to be a temporarily disconnected link or switch on the campus end.

  • 1 min read

File server maintenance

File server maintenance will take place Friday and Saturday night between about 10pm and 3am. Most OCF services will be affected.

  • 1 min read

Kernel upgrades and file server maintenance

All OCF servers will be restarted late Friday night (03/07) to apply kernel security updates. File server maintenance will take place early Saturday morning, and some services may experience extended downtime. All services should be restored by 3am Saturday.

Update: All servers have been restarted. File server maintenance has been postponed to late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. Downtime is expected some time between about 11pm-3am.

  • 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.