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Monday, May 5, 2014

Today's topics:

Power outage in West (New) Wing of Wilson Lab

The following rooms in Wilson Lab will be without power on Tuesday, May 6, 2014, from about 6AM until 8AM: 178, 180, 181, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, Chess reception area, and hallway receptacles.

The people affected should please save any important files to your Samba user directory and shutdown computers and other devices in advance.

Flash

We are aware of some slowdowns in Firefox or potential notices a plugin has crashed when viewing pages with Adobe Flash content on managed CLASSE Windows computers. We are investigating several options to deal with the issue. For now, if you experience the issue there are several steps you can take.
  1. First, please try restarting Firefox. Leaving Firefox running for very long periods can lead to general slowness and instability.
  2. Second, please try clearing your cache.
  3. Finally, we are testing disabling hardware acceleration for resolving this issue. See the "Disable hardware acceleration in Flash" section of this Firefox help page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/adobe-flash-plugin-has-crashed

If none of the above help, there is another option: While we do not support extensions, and they may need to be disabled to resolve other potential issues you may have with Firefox, you can try the FlashBlock extension. FlashBlock is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/ This will make Flash content "Click to play", i.e. it blocks ALL Flash content from loading immediately. Instead, it provides placeholders on the webpage which you can click to download and view the Flash content.

Internet Explorer

The CLASSE computer group supports Firefox as our general purpose browser. However, certain Cornell sites require the use of specific versions of specific browsers. We provide limited support for Cornell sites and Cornell specified government sites (such as Fastlane) which explicitly require IE. You MUST NOT use IE for any other sites, and especially not for general internet browsing. Please use Firefox for all such browsing. We spend a significant amount of time making sure Firefox and its plugins are up to date and secure. The specific versions required for some limited Cornell sites prevent us from doing the same with IE, and we don't have the resources to duplicate effort. For the security of the lab and of your computer, you should severely limit the use of Internet Explorer on CLASSE Managed Windows computers.

Speed up Macintosh Samba access

If your access to the SAMBA file server from a Macintosh is slow, try connecting to
cifs://samba/
instead of
smb://samba/

connectSAMBA.jpg

smb:// tries the SMB2 protocol first and fails over to SMB1; cifs:// goes straight to the SMB1 protocol.

One-click screen capture recording on CLASSE Windows or Mac computers

CLASSE has purchased a subscription for screen/video capture recording on Windows or Mac computers - one can either use the web-based version (Java required), or download and install a standalone application for reasonably current versions of MacOS or Windows.
For more details, see http://www.screencast-o-matic.com
If you need to use Screencast-o-matic (for a presentation, eg), please submit a service request via email to service-classe@cornell.edu or via the web form at https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/ServiceRequest

CUDA development suite upgrade and prototyping Linux system.

The CUDA Linux development suite has been upgraded to 6.0. All tools, libraries, sample code and complied CUDA examples are in /nfs/opt/cuda.

A CUDA code prototyping Linux system, lnx582.classe.cornell.edu, is now available for testing CUDA code. The computer is also known as cudadev.classe.cornell.edu.

Updated documentation for developing and running CUDA programs is available at: https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/CUDA



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 > NewsletterMay052014
Topic revision: 05 May 2014, JamesPulver
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