As some of you have noticed, all of the mailing lists were down for a while. The problem was eventually traced to a lack of communication between the program responsible for distributing email to the lists, and another program it was relying on to filter out spam. This has been fixed, and the lists are now working again.
During the period that email was coming in to the lists but none was being sent out, an enormous queue of messages built up. After some deliberation we decided to let the server chew through them instead of throwing away all of those messages. Since, undoubtedly, many of these messages are not legitimate, this should explain any sudden spike in spam in the next few days. We are still working hard on better spam filtering. Importantly, as the server frantically distributes the tens of thousands of messages waiting in the queue, any new messages that are sent will start at the end of the line and appear not to go through. But the lists are not down — things will go through eventually. According to my calculations, the queue should be processed by Wednesday 8/19, at which point email should flow normally.
Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Posted in Announcements.
Tagged with Mailing Lists, outage.
By Alex Burka
– August 13, 2009
We’ve just completed our transition to LDAP, and have gotten all of our services back online! These changes should be transparent currently, but we have plans for auto-complete in mail and a few other improvements made possible with LDAP. We think we’ve got it working perfectly, but if you find any problems, please let us know!
Posted in Announcements, Status.
Tagged with ldap.
By cschimm1
– July 26, 2009
This weekend we will be upgrading our infrastructure from the outdated and slightly insecure NIS to the new and improved LDAP. Expect downtime for much of the weekend. We will try to get web back up and running first. Thanks for your patience.
Posted in Downtime.
Tagged with ldap, nis, server room, upgrade.
By Alex Burka
– July 24, 2009
It is perhaps a well-kept secret that SCCS has a lot of resources to offer to the community that are hidden under Tarble. With the arrival of our slick cabinet, the Media Pit is finally unlocked and available on a first-come/first-serve basis unless it’s reserved, which is done through email to staff@sccs.swarthmore.edu. Reservations of camera equipment are likewise done through email.
This system could stand improvement. Currently if you want to reserve something, there are too many round-trips over email: you have to find out if it’s available, how long you can have it, when you can pick it up, et cetera. It would be nice if there were some way, maybe a convenient web interface, where one could browse through the near future and check out what is available. Perhaps one could even put a reservation in motion right from this interface.
Good news: rather late in the semester, and very much past its due date, SCCS is launching Concierge, a brand new shiny interface for doing exactly that. We urge anyone who wants to reserve equipment in the future to use this instead of sending us an email directly.
Like any other new software, Concierge certainly has quite a few bugs and rough edges. There is a link in the upper right corner of every page for reporting bugs (note: bad explanations and missing features count as bugs). Please bear with us as we improve Concierge!
Posted in Announcements, Resources.
Tagged with camera, concierge, equipment, video pit.
By Alex Burka
– April 30, 2009
Last week the sound system in the Video Pit failed. We’ve received the new speaker system and are in the process of replacing the hardware. However, this replacement will take a few days and until it’s ready, the pit will be closed and locked. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we think you’ll love the new system once it’s in place.
Posted in Status.
Tagged with failure, sccs, upgrade, video pit.
By Andrew Stromme
– April 13, 2009
Our RAID has been crashing a lot under any significant load lately. We’ve been in touch with our server vendor(Who doesn’t like Debian!) and finally, we might have fixed it for good. The latest server downtime was for a long disk diagnostics test and a firmware upgrade for our RAID controller.
Here’s to hoping we won’t be restarting anytime soon!
-SCCS Staff
Posted in Downtime.
Tagged with outage joy yay!.
By trilok
– March 12, 2009
After a marathon five-hour work session in SCCS yesterday, a whole bunch of new things are up.
We’ve installed our security system! With four cameras that can see in the dark, we’ll be able to watch you live from any computer anywhere! This should allow us to continue to offer our services without much fear of theft, and will help us get our video game system live.
There was a major leak in Tarble, and workbox just finished repairing it. The foul odor that was seeping through the entire basement is slowly vanishing, and is hardly noticeable outside of our server room.
We have an enormous stack of equipment in our lounge. If you want anything from it … it is yours!
Posted in Announcements.
Tagged with lounge, security, server room, workbox.
By Miles
– December 4, 2008
We’re currently compiling a list of software to make sure is installed on all of our Macs. If you have any further suggestions, make sure to let us know!
* VLC (video player)
* Adobe CS4 (image-editing, flash, web development, etc.)
* Skype (im/voip)
* Open Office 3 (text-editing, spreadsheets, presentations)
* FireFox 3 (browser)
* Adium (im)
* Cyberduck (ftp)
* Airfoil (allow any software to play over networked speakers)
* Warcraft III + Frozen Throne (game, RTS)
* Starcraft + Broodwar (game, RTS)
* Unreal Tournament (game, FPS)
* Hamachi X (VPN creation)
* Aperture (photo editing/management)
* Audacity (audio editing)
* Switch (audio file conversion)
* Microsoft Office Suite (Text editing, presentation, and spreadsheets)
* Shakespeer (DC++ client)
* Transmission (Bit Torrent client)
* Quicksilver (app launcher+)
* IE 6 (browser, for testing)
* TextWrangler (text editor)
Posted in Resources.
Tagged with computer, lounge, macs, software.
By Miles
– November 19, 2008
Last night, a 3+ hour long power outage struck all across campus. This also took down SCCS’s server, and our backup hard drives prevented the servers from coming back online. About an hour ago, Dougal Sutherland ’11 manually reset them, and things should be back to normal—let us know if they aren’t.
We are also working to figure out ways to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
Posted in Status.
Tagged with outage.
By Miles
– November 9, 2008
Today, SCCS added a new computer to our flock—a Mac Pro.
Stats
One 16x SuperDrive
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
2GB (2 x 1GB) (We’ll be adding more soon)
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
The Name
We ran a vote with a run-off. The three finalists were Roadrunner (w/ 6 votes), Puffin (w/ 3 votes), and Kestrel (w/ 4 votes). The final voting gave us:
Roadrunner: Kofi and Trilok
Puffin: Jonah, Andrew, Ryan
Kestrel: Dougal, Alex, Miles, and Will
Posted in Announcements.
Tagged with Kestrel, lounge, Mac Pro.
By Miles
– November 5, 2008