Monday, March 31, 2014

Today's topics:

Wilson Lab Network Interruption: Tuesday, April 1 @ 9:00 AM

There will be a brief 30-second network interruption in Wilson Lab, around 9:00 AM on Tuesday, April 1. The purpose of the interruption is for CIT to prepare a new high-speed connection between Wilson and CCC, which will eventually provide 10-gigabit network connectivity among the buildings of CLASSE (currently 1-gigabit).

Microsoft Word malware vulnerability

Please remember not to view attachments sent to you from addresses you do not recognize. The attack described below is just one of many similar ones.

Microsoft recently announced that Word is vulnerable to malware embedded in some .RTF (Rich Text Format) documents. Word is included as part of Office, which is installed on all CLASSE managed Windows and Macintosh computers. It will be updated to fix this vulnerability when Microsoft makes a permanent patch available. For details, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2953095

X2Go documentation update for IceWM

CLASSE is evaluating X2Go as an alternative to VNC and a replacement for freenx. X2Go is a fully open source, actively developed project to support the remote execution of X applications, including full Linux graphical desktops. If you've been helping test X2Go and have been using the icewm desktop, our documentation has now been updated to recommend changing the custom desktop command from icewm to icewm-session. For complete documentation, please see X2Go.

CLASSE Farm queues are stopped

As mentioned in the last newsletter, the CLASSE Farm queues are currently stopped through Wednesday, April 2nd in the afternoon to allow an upgrade to the queuing software and bring several new nodes and capabilities on line. This means that you cannot currently submit new jobs to the CLASSE compute Farm. Starting Wed we will have several new capabilities including one GPU for CUDA calculations. Please see our Gridengine documentation for new examples on Wednesday.

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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.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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