Winter 2003 System Updates

• Account Information Page - A new web-based account information page is on-line. This page displays a plethora of information about your existing CS accounts as well as a number of CS services you may, or may not, be using. Please see the Account Information FAQ Page for more information.

• Disk/Quota Upgrades - All Sharkestra/Whale, Burrow/Paca, and Moose home directories have been moved from older disk arrays to the new, higher performance SAN RAID array. In conjunction with this move, disk quotas have been increased from 100MB to 150MB in the Burrow, from 500MB to 700MB in the Sharkestra for all current graduate students, and increased to 1GB for faculty and staff on Moose.

• New nobackup storage - A new class of storage has been added to compliment existing home directories and /scratch. This new storage is called /nobackup and 500MB of quota is available to Burrow users and 1GB for Sharkestra users. This new storage is on the high-performance, high-availability SAN RAID array just like home directories BUT it isn't being backed up.

  In order to get started with this new nobackup storage space, just run makenobackup and read the information that is displayed.

  Please see the Available Storage Space FAQ Page for more information.

• Printing Transparencies - The old transparency printer, pstransparency, has been decommissioned and there is a new procedure for printing transparencies. Please see the Printing Transparencies FAQ Page for details.

• Mac OS X Upgrade - The department Macs in LH201 and LH016 are being upgraded to Mac OS X. These upgrades should be completed by Febuary 7th.

• Router Access Control Lists - We are continuing to tune the Access Control Lists on the CS router to block certain network traffic for security reasons. Please see the Router Blocking FAQ Page for more information.

• Spam Blocking - We are continuing to refine and tune the available anti-spam tools. Please see the Spam Filtering FAQ Page for the latest information. Note that the killspam program described in this page has been updated to allow you to specify a spam probability to better control the behavior of your mail filtering.

• Wireless - We have made some configuration changes to the wireless network to improve reception in poorly covered areas of the building. The reception in the LH101 and LH215 conference rooms and in the basement should be significantly better. In addition to the changes in the 802.11b wireless network, we also now have an 802.11a access point in LH316. We have seen interference from things like microwave ovens wreak havoc on the 2.4GHz 802.11b network but 802.11a operates at 5GHz so it should be less susceptable to interference. It also operates at higher speeds, with a maximum theoretical throughput of 54Mbps as compared to 11Mbps with 802.11b. Currently, the range of coverage from this single 802.11a access point is limited (the coverage is pretty good in 316, 310, 416, and 215) but if you are using one of the new 802.11a/b combo cards it will allow seamless operation with either standard.

• Java - The default version of the Java JDK/SDK in /l/jdk on the CS Suns has changed from version 1.3 to version 1.4. Please see the Java on the Suns Page for more information.

• Web Email Address Hiding - We have documentation and an associated CGI script available to help prevent spammers from harvesting your email address from web pages. Please see the FAQ on this topic for information.

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