🚀 go-pugleaf

Date:		October 1, 2000

* Backups:  During September several enhancements were made to the
  backup system and new clients were issued on supported machines.
  Owners of laptops who initiate their own backups will be receiving new
  clients in the near future.

    Backup of open files on Windows NT/2000:   Integration with Columbia
    Data Products' Open Transaction Manager (OTM) allows Windows NT and
    Windows 2000 clients to backup open files.  Users no longer have to
    worry about closing their applications and logging off of their system
    each day.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: OTM does not support Windows 95/98 open files.  Users
    that are still running these operating systems should still close any
    running applications before running a manual backup from their desktop.

    New authentication support provides secure access to backup clients
    from only authenticated backup servers.  Optional encryption of data
    over the network is now available.  Due to the additional overhead on
    the backup server, data is not currently encrypted by default.  This
    option will be made available as requested.

    Support is now available for vmware Windows clients running under
    Linux.  The vmware client backs up like an ordinary Windows NT client.

* Win 2000 AFS client is scheduled to be released during the last week
  of October.

* Please again remember that we are unable to do backups on machines
  that are powered off. Please leave all computers running at all times.

* We have been granting graduate students administrative rights to supported
  NT machines. However, a small number of graduate students are then using these
  rights to change the Administrative password, add users, etc. When we find
  this situation we are removing administrative rights from the users as
  such tactics make it difficult for ECE to administer the machines. Please
  use administrative rights for the purposes for which they were intended -
  installing software/printers/etc.

* Following are the gripe system statistics:
  In September we processed approximately 760 gripes
             Gripe Status Report for 09/01/2000 to 09/30/2000

User              Closed Current  30-60d  60-90d   Older  (Open)       Total

alan                  21      10       2       0       0      12          33
allbery              114       2       0       0       0       2         116
dwilhelm              42       8       4       1       1      14          56
grosland              55       6       0       0       0       6          61
henson                75       9       5       1       9      24          99
jmck                 128      13       0       0       1      14         142
lou                  255       2       0       0       0       2         257
mmh                    3       1       0       0       0       1           4
rburgett               7       3       0       0       1       4          11
tardis                20       6       2       0       0       8          28
zoog                  39      19       0       0       1      20          59

TOTAL                759      79      13       2      13     107         866

The oldest open gripe is 322.3 days old.  The median is 11.5 days.
The most idle gripe has been idle for 306.3 days.  The median is 5.4 days.
The oldest unacknowledged gripe is 102.3 days old.  The median is 2.6 days.

Average gripe acknowledgement time: 0.5 days (median: 0)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 4.3 days (median: 2.6)
Average gripe resolution time: 5.6 days (median: 0.3)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 17.5 days (median: 4.9)

- Virtually all the news below this point is related to UNIX 
users. Please read on, but be aware that is more technical and
may not apply to all users.

* Cadence:
  Machines running Solaris 2.7 cannot call a Verilog simulation
  directly from icms because of an interaction with AFS.  We are working
  with Transarc and Cadence to resolve this problem.  Until a
  resolution is reached the work around is to specify /tmp, or some
  other local disk, as the run directory.

  REMINDER:  The 4.4.5 release of the Cadence tools uses flock for for
  Read Only locks.  As a result users of this software must set the k
  ACL on their AFS space, as well as rl.  If you receive a message 
  like "<file> is in use by another user, cannot obtain lock" and
  you know this is not the case, please check that the directory has
  the k ACL.

* Installed new SiCat licenses

* Installed new Synopsys license

* Resolved several problems with  Statemate software

* Corrected a problem with the script that generates the list of
  student web pages.

* Installed version 6.2.3 of CFDRC

* Replaced disk controller on AFS server RAID disk.  No down time, no
  data lost

* MathWorks is revising their pricing significantly for Matlab. This will
  result in a significant increase in price AND a significant reduction
  in the number of folks who can use the product concurrently. This will
  occur in February 2001. As such, if there are alternative products that
  researchers wish to consider, it is necessary that we begin such
  evaluations immediately. 

* An adapted version of the CS department's emacs zephyr client has been
  installed locally.  Please see
  http://www.ece.cmu.edu/insider/facilities/zephyr-reference.txt
  for more information.

* By popular demand, gcc 2.95.2 has been installed on alpha_dux40, i386_suse62,
  rs_aix43, sun4x_56, and sun4x_57.  The C compiler may be invoked as
  /usr/local/bin/gcc-2.95.2 and the C++ compiler may be invoked as
  /usr/local/bin/g++-2.95.2 The default gcc version remains unchanged, 
  at 2.95.1.  The default will likely become 2.95.2 in late December 
  or early January.  At that time, 2.95.1 will be retained, but will 
  still be invokable as /usr/local/bin/gcc-2.95, and a message will 
  be posted to cmu.ece.general noting the change.

* XEmacs has been upgraded to v21.1.12.

* GNOME components released:
  libxml (rerelease), gdk-pixbuf, rep-gdk (rerelease with gdk-pixbuf),
  gnome-libs, gnome-core, gnome-applets

  This completes a basic Helix GNOME.  It is currently considered a *test*
  version; we would like to know of any problems you find with it (send mail
  to gripe@ece as usual), but we don't promise any quick fixes.  To start it
  you need to run /usr/local/gnome/bin/gnome-session from your ~/.xinitrc or
  ~/.xsession; you currently need to set PATH beforehand to include
  /usr/local/gnome/bin, and on Solaris and OSF/1 (Digital Unix) you need:

   setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/gnome/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

* Netscape roaming profile support is now available.  You must contact
  Facilities to set it up, as we need to set a password for access to your
  remote profile
--
Lou Anschuetz, lou@ece.cmu.edu
Network Manager, ECE, Carnegie Mellon University