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News from the staff team

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Login Server Upgrades

We just upgraded the operating system of one of our login servers, conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU. The machine now is available for general use and will be re-added to our login server alias once we're sure that everything works. Feel free to give the server a test drive, but please note that we might have to reboot it a few times in the coming days.

This operating system upgrade allows us to deliver greater security and better application support to our users. In fact, I'm pleased to announce that we now support Mercurial, a popular distributed version control system.

We'll also be upgrading apocalypse.OCF.Berkeley.EDU soon. If you really need a place to work uninterrupted this weekend, you can try our Linux login server, tsunami.OCF.Berkeley.EDU.

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Power Outage

There will be a power outage in the building housing our core servers between 1-6 AM on Thursday, October 23. We anticipate shutting down our servers around midnight tonight and powering them back on as soon as we can.

I apologize for the short notice, but we were just notified today.

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Maintenance Complete

We've finished our maintenance ahead of schedule, and all OCF services should be working again.

Thanks for your patience and understanding!

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Planned Maintenance

The OCF is currently down for maintenance. Some of you may have noticed the unplanned downtime this past Tuesday, which was related to errors with our disk array, which houses mail as well as many of the critical files for the OCF. This downtime is meant to help fix some of those problems and stabilize our servers.

We don't expect it to last past 9 AM on Sunday, October 19.

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Unplanned Downtime

We began having problems communicating with our disk array this morning. Since most of our data is stored on the disk array, many of our services are currently offline.

We are working on fixing the disk array. The data on the disk array is backed up daily, so even if the disk array is broken, all data should be safe.

UPDATE: We've brought back all our services as of 3:30 PM. Let us know if anything is behaving strangely.

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iPhone-tailored OCF website

Been thinking about doing this for a while now, and as of today, owners of the iPhone and iPod Touch can point their devices to: ocf.berkeley.edu/iphone for a slimmed down essentials-only mobile version designed specifically for this viewport. There are some goodies in there, including the phone number linking to your dial pad, or the map location linking to your built-in Google Maps.

I've tested it against the iPhone SDK's simulator, and against Safari in general, and we'd love any feedback you have. For those of you without these devices, you can play around with it with TestiPhone.com, though it should work with most devices with similar viewports. Or you can simply view screenshots. And of course, you always have the option to view the full versions of these pages in these devices.

I have plans to develop a more general mobile version for other devices as time permits. Keep posted. Coming to a device near you.

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OCF System Maintenance Fall 2008

The OCF is down for maintenance. We don't anticipate that it will last more than 12 hours, but if it does, we will post updates here.

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Buzz

Check us out at The Daily Clog for an outsider perspective on our Heller-to-Eshleman relocation situation. Free computing is becoming a little hard to come by these days, but we will be back and better before the first snow falls. (Luckily, we're in California.)

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FREE FOOD!

The OCF is holding a General Meeting on Thursday, September 11 at 7PM in 263 Dwinelle.

There will be free food! Come hear the latest news about our lab relocation and meet the staff who keep your services running!

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Unplanned Mail Downtime

At 3AM on September 1, we began having issues with the hardware hosting our mail. We are currently working on identifying the problem and minimizing its impact upon the rest of our services.

We will update this post once we have more information.

UPDATE: It looks like our disk array had some hard drive issues. We were using mirrored hard drives, so we don't think any data was affected. Everything should be working again, but please let us know if you see anything out of the ordinary.