🚀 go-pugleaf

Date:		October 1, 1999

* ECE Facilities is pleased to announce that Mathew Henson will be
  joining us as a user consultant. He brings terrific organizational
  as well as technical skills to the organization.

* In September we have had both a disk failure and a SCSI controller
  failure on different RAID boxes used for our AFS cell. Neither
  failure resulted in any outage.

* Central has been replaced by a much newer machine with more disk
  space and memory.

* Saturn has been removed from service. If you are a MacAFS user and
  are having difficulty authenticating to the new MacAFS server, please
  contact gripe@ece.cmu.edu for assistance. 

* Faraday has been replaced by an IBM 43P.

* Doppler will be decommissioned on October 1, 1999.

* Facalum has been decommissioned with its four
  remaining users migrated to faraday.

* Fifty PCs received via Intel grants were deployed in September.

* Following are the gripe system statistics:
  In September we processed approximately 1050 gripes
             Gripe Status Report for 09/01/1999 to 09/30/1999

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

afleming               4       0       0       0       0       0           4
alan                  26       7       0       0       0       7          33
allbery              199       2       0       0       0       2         201
anhalt                 1       2       1       0       0       3           4
cof                   37       7       2       0       0       9          46
dwilhelm              65       9       2       1       0      12          77
egadd                  1       0       0       0       0       0           1
jferro                50       5       2       1       2      10          60
jmck                 248      12       8       0       4      24         272
lou                  272       1       0       0       0       1         273
mmh                   15       0       0       0       0       0          15
rburgett               9       5       0       0       0       5          14
tardis                 7       3       3       0       0       6          13
zoog                  73      21      18       6       3      48         121

TOTAL               1007      74      36       8       9     127        1134

The oldest open gripe is 65.3 days old.  The median is 16.9 days.
The most idle gripe has been idle for 65.3 days.  The median is 13.3 days.
The oldest unacknowledged gripe is 65.3 days old.  The median is 18.6 days.

Average gripe acknowledgment time: 0.6 days (median: 0)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 4.9 days (median: 2.9)
Average gripe resolution time: 2.7 days (median: 0.2)
For gripes older than 1 day, the average is 9 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.

* We are now down to 8 DECstations within the department. Of these 8,
  2 belong to ECE Facilities and are in the process of being 
  De-commissioned. Please remember that these will not be supported 
  after December 31, 1999.

* Another RAID box has been acquired for our AFS, increasing our
  cell size by about 110GB, That will be bring our AFS cell to 
  roughly 425GB.

* As noted in the August newsletter, Cadence 4.43 has been installed
  and is now available for use.  Users need to begin transitioning to
  this release before 1/1/2000 as several features in the current 
  release have been replaced and will no longer be supported after
  the first of the year.

  To ease the transition a /usr/cds99 directory is being created on
  supported IBM and Solaris platforms.  On all machines, WITH THE
  EXCEPTION OF THOSE RUNNING Solaris 2.6, /usr/cds points to the
  97A version of Cadence and /usr/cds99 points to version 4.43.  There
  are compatibility issues between Solaris 2.6 and CDS 97A so both 
  /usr/cds and /usr/cds99 point to 4.43.  You will notice that there
  has been a substantial reorganization under 4.43.

  We are looking for people who are making the transition to document
  the steps required and create a web page.  If you are interested in
  helping out with this please send a message to jmck@ece.cmu.edu

* Received and installed a 12 month Hspice license.

* Rebuilt one of our "secondary" AFS servers, akuhuu.ece.cmu.edu.

* updated perl with newer modules, fixed core dumps on Solaris

* released XFree86 3.3.5 for Linux; this caused considerable pain, because
  the new version has several annoying bugs.  these have mostly been fixed
  now, except for the fact that xdm doesn't work (which we are still working
  on)

* re-released Berkeley DB, with more compatibility between old and new
  versions:
        -I/usr/local/berkeleydb/include -L/usr/local/berkeleydb/lib
        old:    -ldb1
        new:    -ldb2

* UNSUPPORTED contrib:  xmms for Linux and Solaris (warning: small bug causes
  it to default to disk output; make sure you go into settings and set output
  plugin) with multicast capability

* for other platforms there is /usr/local/libexec/micecastd to receive
  multicast streams; the -p option is necessary if you want to connect to it
  from other systems

* those of you who like to listen to certain MP3 streams from CS might want to
  look at http://tully.ece.cmu.edu:9000/
  ** THIS SERVICE MAY BE DISCONTINUED WITHOUT NOTICE **

* fixed a problem with the default search in RT which made it appear to not be
  working (twiddling the search form and hitting the "update" button would have
  worked)

* we are examining possible upgrades for our Linux environment

* retracted postilion package, as it was not working and it could break tkrat

* Gnuplot has been upgraded to version 3.7 on alpha_dux40, sun4_55,
  i386_linux3, rs_aix41 and rs_aix43 systems.

* xmgr has been installed for alpha_dux40, i386_linux3, rs_aix43,
  sun4_55 and sun4x_56 systems.

* Matlab has been upgraded to version 3.5 on alpha_dux40, i386_linux3,
  rs_aix43, sun4_55 and sun4x_56.

* Cadence and Hspice have been installed for rs_aix43.

* PGP, acroread, and top have been released for rs_aix43.

* ispell has been recompiled for rs_aix43 to solve a shared library
  problem.

* The startup of the Network Time Protocol daemon on AIX 4.3 has been
  changed to minimize its memory usage.  This recovered up to 30 MB of
  main memory on some systems.

* JDK 1.1.2 has been released for rs_aix41.  A JDK for Java 1.1.6 is
  already available on rs_aix43 systems.

* All systems are now being checked on a daily basis to remove temporary
  files and directories.  With only a few exceptions, files in /tmp and
  /usr/tmp will be deleted if they are more than 7 days old, and files in
  /scratch will be deleted if they are more than 30 days old.  Empty
  directories will be deleted regardless of their age.

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