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News from the staff team

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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.
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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ocf.berkeley.edu now points to web server

After nearly three years of deprecating the ocf.berkeley.edu hostname for SSH/SFTP access to shell accounts,  we have decided to point ocf.berkeley.edu to the web server.

The good news is that ocf.berkeley.edu in web browsers will seamlessly redirect (302 permanent redirect) to www.ocf.berkeley.edu. Less keystrokes, less to remember.

The bad news is that you cannot access your shell account using the hostname ocf.berkeley.edu. You will need to use ssh.ocf.berkeley.edu as has been listed in our wiki documentation.

We believe that the compromise is worth it especially in light of the long transition period.

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Unexpected downtime as services are inaccessible

The OCF webserver (www.ocf/death.ocf) and login servers (ssh.ocf/tsunami.ocf,supernova.ocf) are offline.  They are virtual machines hosted on hal.ocf which is still running and responds to network requests.

No current estimate on when the servers will be back up.  I am contacting site managers now.

Update 1am:  Network problems fixed. All services back up.

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Email virtual hosting downtime

Email virtual hosting (e.g., email forwarding for person@group.berkeley.edu) was unavailable today, April 27, between 2am and 11:30pm. Email senders during this time would have received a bounce message that said "Relay access denied". We apologize for the inconvenience.

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Campus-wide outage

The entire campus appears to have been inaccessible from outside between 12:19am and 2:11am, so OCF was inaccessible from off-campus as well. We do not yet know the cause of the widespread outage.

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File storage system (NFS) restructure

We will be restructuring our file storage system sometime over the next semester. Please be aware that the u1-u8 file structure will be gone. If you have any files that depend on that file structure, they will not work anymore. They can be fixed by changing them to use your home directory (e.g. /home/f/fo/foo instead of /mnt/u3/home/f/fo/foo).

Update 1/25: We will be taking the OCF down at around 10pm (we decided to delay until 1:15am).

Update 1/26: Due to routine maintenance before the restructuring, NFS will be down for at least all of Saturday. Total downtime was between 1:15am and 3:00pm.

Update 1/28: NFS file storage maintenance partially completed. We will be taking the OCF down again sometime in the near-ish future to finish the maintenance.

Update 2/11: We will be taking the OCF down on Saturday, February 16 to finish maintenance of the NFS file storage system.

Update 2/13: Maintenance will start on Saturday after 6pm when the lab is closed. Web hosting, email, and SSH/SFTP will be intermittently inaccessible during maintenance.

Update 2/17: The file storage maintenance has been completed successfully. Downtime occurred during the 11:30pm to 12:00am (30 minutes) maintenance window. Note that hard-coded references to /mnt will no longer work.