Skip to content

News from the staff team

  • 1 min read

Maintenance Day and Minor Downtime

The OCF will be closed on Sunday, September 23 for cleaning. Some lab workstations may be temporarily turned off throughout the day. Furthermore, there will be a slight disruption in our services between 2 and 3 PM while we install hardware into one of our core servers.

UPDATE: As some people have inquired about which services will be affected by the downtime, we anticipate that most of our mail services (IMAP/POP3/SMTP and mailing lists) will be affected by the downtime.

  • 1 min read

First General Meeting for Fall 2007

Welcome back OCFers!

We hope everyone is excited for a new school year with OCF.

Our first general meeting will be held on Thursday, September 13th in 283 Dwinelle at 7pm.
Come learn more about the OCF
 Learn how to become a staff member
Help elect the OCF General Manager and Site Manager
 Find out about our upcoming events

Also, stay afterwards for some food and socializing. We hope to see all of you there!

  • 1 min read

Mail quota reporting in webmail

Following suggestions from staffers and others, our webmail interface now reports how much disk space your inbox is taking and how close you are to the maximum at the left of the screen, below the folders listing.

Reminder: unless you've received a quota increase, you're permitted to have 10 MB of mail in your inbox. Mail in folders other than the inbox does not count against your mail quota; it's recorded under your home directory quota (which is 400 MB by default). For more information, see our documentation.

  • 1 min read

Reminder: secure POP and IMAP now required

As previously announced, secure connections are now required to read your OCF email; in particular, POP and IMAP users who have not already configured their mail clients to use secure connections need to do so in order to keep using them. If you're not sure how to do this, have a look at our instructions for several popular mail clients.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us (email staff@ocf.berkeley.edu).

  • 1 min read

System Status 2.0


The "System Status" page, linked from the front page, has been updated with improved accuracy of which OCF computers are on, as well as details such as uptime, names, and user numbers. (Thanks, Aaron). In addition to that, the graphics have been entirely redone to make them more recognizable. We hope you find it that much more useful, and don't forget that the lab webcam is broadcasting again.

  • 1 min read

Upcoming Downtime

The OCF will be going down for maintenance on Sunday, July 1 for approximately 2 hours beginning at 6 PM. Mail will be queued up during the downtime and delivered when service resumes.

  • 1 min read

Web Security Upgrade

One of the features that the OCF is rolling out this summer is increased web server security for our users and their web applications. We've added some tools that'll monitor web traffic and intercept many common types of attacks, giving our users an extra level of protection from newly discovered vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, though, these tools will help protect our users from comment spam (unsolicited commercial postings). The OCF web server receives more than one million requests every day, and a growing number of these requests are attempts by automated programs to post spam on our users' blogs, galleries, and web sites. Besides leaving distasteful messages, these programs also place a great burden upon our infrastructure, slowing down our services.

We've currently enabled an aggressive set of filters to catch most attacks and spam, and we will continue to add filters as new attacks are discovered. As with any automated monitoring system, though, there will always be the possibility for incorrectly tagged requests. If you're having problems with your web site, please let us know.

Also, please keep in mind that these security systems are designed to help us help you. We encourage OCF users to keep their web applications up-to-date, as bugs and security holes are being fixed every day, and it's impossible for us to protect every single application that our diverse user base employs. We also highly encourage users to install plugins to reduce the flow of spam via captchas or other methods.

  • 1 min read

Secure POP and IMAP transition

As of August 1, 2007, the OCF will be requiring all users to use secure connections to read their OCF email. Users who use webmail and/or local mail access (using a program such as pine, elm, or mutt from an OCF Unix machine) exclusively will not be affected. Otherwise, you will need to reconfigure your mail client to use secure connections when receiving mail; we have instructions on our wiki for some popular mail clients. (If you have a correction or clarification for us, or instructions for another client, please email them to staff@ocf.berkeley.edu.)

The latest information on the changes can be found on our wiki at http://docs.ocf.berkeley.edu/wiki/Major_service_changes.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us (email staff@ocf.berkeley.edu).

  • 1 min read

Server Reboots on Wednesday

As announced on our website and login server MOTDs, we rebooted one of our core servers on Wednesday for operating system maintenance. Downtime was as long as anticipated, but we also ended up having to reboot our login servers (conquest, apocalypse, and tsunami) since they were having issues. Everything's working now, and we thank you for your continued patience as we make changes to our infrastructure to deliver more reliable services to all OCF users.

We also have some really neat features in development this summer. One of the most anticipated projects is a self-serve backup system, which will allow OCF users to access daily snapshots of their data for at least the past seven days. More information will be posted as we approach a public beta test.

  • 1 min read

Sun Studio Compilers

We've updated the compilers available on our Solaris systems from Sun Forte 6 to Sun Studio 11. Enjoy!