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March 2, 2015

Today's topics:

VPN upgrade tomorrow (Tuesday, March 3rd)

As mentioned last week, at 10AM tomorrow:
  • There will be a 30 minute outage of VPN service while we upgrade the VPN server.
    • You will be disconnected from the VPN if connected.
    • You will not be able to connect to the VPN during the upgrade.
  • CLASSE Managed Windows computers will also have the VPN client software set to upgrade.
    • The upgrade will happen the next time you are connected to the VPN or to the LNS Protected network.
    • You will be disconnected from the VPN while the upgrade takes place.
    • The VPN icon may change, but the way you use it will not change.
    • If you have problems, please try a wired connection to the LNS Protected network and waiting 30 minutes. This will allow the automated system to try to fix the VPN configuration for you. If the software still doesn't work, please open a service request.

Increased /tmp disk space on CLASSE Farm nodes

CLASSE supports a compute farm to provide equitable access to high-power CPU and GPU nodes for batch, interactive, and parallel compute jobs. To accommodate new user requests, we have increased the /tmp filesystem on all CLASSE farm nodes to 100GB (or as large as possible, if less than 100GB are available on an individual node). This local disk space can be used to improve the performance of I/O intensive jobs by copying data to /tmp at the beginning of a job, reading and writing to /tmp during the job, and copying any necessary data off of /tmp at the end of the job.

To view the amount of free, total, and used tmp space on each farm member use qhost -F tmpfree,tmptot,tmpused . To schedule a job on a node with at least 90G free in /tmp, for example, use qsub -l tmpfree=90G myscript.sh .

For more information on using the CLASSE Compute Farm, please see the CLASSE Wiki page GridEngine

Please note that anything stored in /tmp on any Linux system is subject for removal after 10 days. For exact file deletion policies, please see the CLASSE Wiki page TemDisk.

Default PDF Viewer on Linux

On Tuesday, the default PDF Viewer on linux will change to okular. This change is in response to repeated problems printing various PDF files generated by Microsoft Word from the old linux PDF viewer (evince). If you'd like to override the system-wide default for any reason, you can do so using ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list. For example, adding the following to your ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list would set your personal default PDF viewer back to evince.

[Default Applications]
application/pdf=evince.desktop

W320_XRX_5500 printer is being retired this week

On Wednesday, we will be retiring the w320_xrx_5500 printer and replacing it with a printer called w320_br_5470. The new printer is NOT capable of printing 11X17. If you need to print 11X17, please use the w229_xrx_7800_11X17 printer/queue or the w210_xrx_5550_11x17 printer/queue.

Firefox v36 is incompatible with many Cornell services

Please don't update your personal computers to Firefox v36. It has been found to be incompatible with many of Cornell's central services. CLASSE's managed computers are running Firefox v31.4.0 ESR, so they continue to be compatible. Some of the incompatible services include Blackboard, Confluence, PeopleSoft, EZRA, and Sponsored Portal.



General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.


Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:


This topic: Computing > Computing/CmpGrp > CmpgrpLinks > NewsLetter > NewsletterMarch022015
Topic revision: 02 Mar 2015, WilliamBrangan
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