🚀 go-pugleaf

Date:		April 1, 2000

* We wish to welcome aboard Matt Grosland as our new Mac/NT/UNIX system
  administrator. Matt will be starting on April 3, 2000.

* We are rapidly increasing our remote management of Windows NT. In Windows,
  however, it is frequently necessary to reboot the machine in order
  to finish some installation or upgrade. We wish to standardize on a time
  for these reboots so that we will have the least impact on users
  productivity. Consequently, beginning Friday April 7, 2000 and every
  Friday thereafter, we will, if necessary, reboot all supported NT
  machines at approximately 7:00a.m. As we get better at this process,
  we will try to move the reboot time to an earlier hour.

* Note that as of midnight, February 29, 2000, Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus
  was no longer a legal product at CMU.  However, CMU now licenses
  Norton Anti-Virus, which has been installed on all supported Macintosh
  and PC computers. If for some reason we've missed you, please let
  us know so that we might do the installation.

* For Windows users:
  When working with text, the mouse is extremely inefficient. You'll waste 
  less time if you start relying on keyboard shortcuts for cursor 
  manipulation. Need some help getting started? In rich text environments 
  (like Outlook Express, Microsoft Word, etc.), SHIFT will traditionally 
  'select' and CTRL will 'move.' CTRL+BACKSPACE will delete entire words at a 
  time; CTRL+HOME will take you to the top of the document; CTRL+SHIFT+HOME 
  will select all data between your cursor and the top of your document (END 
  will take you to the end); CTRL+LEFT CURSOR will move you one word back 
  (and RIGHT will move you right); SHIFT+HOME will select all text in that 
  paragraph/line. Don't dismiss these tips; you could be spending more time 
  eating lunch.

* We have begun some experimentation with Windows 2000. As previously
  noted, it really requires a fast processor and 128MB of memory to
  run as fast as Windows 98 does on a lesser processor with less
  memory. There are also a number of installation
  problems that are cropping up, which we are working through. For
  example, we just submitted a revision to the installation instructions
  posted by IBM as they had missed a major problem that occurs on
  some of their machines when Windows 2000 is installed. Also, we do
  not yet have a backup client for this OS. As we get the bugs worked
  out we will keep you posted.

* We are in the process of setting up dynamic leasing of addresses for
  users coming to ECE with laptops. This would mean they could simply
  plug their laptop in, allow it to use DHCP to establish an 
  address on the net and be up and running. The number of such 
  available addresses would be small as we do not have large numbers
  of spare addresses, and we would enforce a limited use rule. For
  example, we are considering setting it up so that an address used
  for more than 48 hours would get blocked at the router as a way
  of keeping folks from using these temporary addresses instead of 
  purchasing a permanent address.  More information on this project 
  will be posted to ece.general as details are ironed out.

* Following are the gripe system statistics:
  In March we processed approximately 555 gripes
             Gripe Status Report for 03/01/2000 to 03/31/2000

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

afleming               1       0       0       0       0       0           1
alan                  22       1       0       0       0       1          23
allbery               87       1       0       0       0       1          88
anhalt                 1       0       0       0       0       0           1
cof                   32       7       0       0       0       7          39
dwilhelm              41       4       1       0       1       6          47
henson                54       4       4       1       2      11          65
jferro                15       5       5       1       1      12          27
jmck                 127       3       0       1       1       5         132
lou                  150       6       1       0       0       7         157
mmh                    5       1       0       0       0       1           6
rburgett               2       2       0       0       0       2           4
zoog                  47       6       0       0       0       6          53

TOTAL                584      40      11       3       5      59         643

The oldest open gripe is 154.5 days old.  The median is 14.2 days.
The most idle gripe has been idle for 135.6 days.  The median is 9 days.
The oldest unacknowledged gripe is 10.4 days old.  The median is 3.4 days.

Average gripe acknowledgment time: 1.7 days (median: 0)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 10.6 days (median: 2.7)
Average gripe resolution time: 5.1 days (median: 0.3)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 13.3 days (median: 5)

- 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.

* REMINDER:  It is once again time for the quarterly full
  backup of all systems other than Macs (they are backed up using
  different software).  This will involve updating the client 
  software loaded on user machines.  For users on Unix and Windows NT
  machines this will happen automatically.  USERS OF WIN95 AND WIN98
  MACHINES PLEASE SEND A MESSAGE TO GRIPE@ECE SO THAT WE CAN SCHEDULE
  A TIME DURING THE NEXT WEEK TO INSTALL THE NEW SOFTWARE so that
  you can initiate a backup.

* Upgraded coyote software on valens

* Installed updates to the Mentor Graphics License

* Issued an updated backup client for Win95/Win98 clients.  This update
  uses dialog boxes to notify the user of backup status, etc.

* Upgraded the memory on the new WWW server to 256 meg

* Received and installed an additional RAID server for AFS.  This
  brings our total available AFS space to just of 500 gigabytes of
  space.  Of that space 435 gigabytes is running on RAID servers.  The
  balance of that space is used primarily as a staging area for 
  software installations and removals.

* Continued working on refinements to the new web server software.

* Installed Saber5.1

* Fixed several problems involving the department news server.
  The first of these involved the server not returning free disk space
  after deleting articles.  We also worked with several other departments
  correct problems with our feeds to and from them.  

* Installed HP EESof Hpads version 1.3

* Archived 3 additional CDs of expired accounts.

* zephyr updated
  we are still waiting on a cross-realm fix from shadow@andrew before we can
  go live with cross-realm

* tzc updated

* modified kclient for Windows, hopefully will improve behavior of NiftyTelnet
  and Mulberry

* IMSP server configuration altered, now works reliably

* Mulberry modifications for ECE compatibility

* Updated i386_suse62 install with TeTeX, VMware

* Xaw3D released on all supported platforms

* gv 3.5.8 released on all supported platforms (replaces previous
  /usr/local/bin/gv, which was a symlink to ghostview 1.5)

--
Lou Anschuetz, lou@ece.cmu.edu
Network Manager, ECE, Carnegie Mellon University