University of California at Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Instructional Systems Support Group /usr/pub/reports/manager/Fall_1996 Report on EECS Instructional Computing Facilities ------------------------------------------------- Fall Semester 1996 by: Kevin Mullally, Manager of EECS Instructional Systems Ferenc Kovac, Manager of EECS Electronic Support For a desciption of the current status of Instructional UNIX labs and file servers, please read /usr/pub/EECS.facilities (also accessible as http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/usr/pub/EECS.facilities). For decriptions of additions and changes to software availability, please read /usr/pub/Instructors.Guide, /usr/pub/software.help and other specific files in the /usr/pub directory (also accessible as http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/usr/pub/). Our WWW home pages are: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu http://www-esg.eecs.berkeley.edu PCs and Lab Changes in Soda --------------------------- Instruction will install new Pentium PCs from Intel in Soda Hall labs in the first weeks of the semester. Earlier plans to install NT on these systems have changed. We are now investigating which UNIX would best suit our needs. Operating systems under consideration include BSDI, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. The deciding factors are: does the operating system run on the hardware we have been given (Intel bundles a variety of disk, video and network interfaces); do the application programs we need run on the operating system; can we afford the licensing fees, if any. 1) 283D and 283E Soda: _may_ have additional network connections installed so that Pentium PCs running UNIX couild be installed there, for Instructional use. I do not yet know if this networking is possible. 2) 564 Soda: will be converted into an Instructional multimedia authoring facility for instructors and TAs. 3) 330 Soda: HP wkstns for 1st year grads have been moved to other rooms (466,566 and 592 Soda). 4) 330 Soda: Pentium PCs running UNIX will be installed for general Instructional use. Change to Modem Access - Home-IP password required -------------------------------------------------- Starting August 26, aaccess to all EECS modems will require a password. This is the same procedure that IS&T implemented in June 1996. More information is available at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/modems.html New Cardkey Procedures ---------------------- This semester, we are tring a new procedure for enabling cardkey access to the labs quickly. Students who do not have an EECS cardkey should go to 391 Cory (8:30am-noon, 1pm-4:30pm) to sign up for a new cardkey. Students who already have an EECS cardkey can go to either 391 Cory or 387 Soda. We are trying a new procedure for enabling the cardkeys, and we hope to enable all cardkeys within 2 working days of the request. Initially, we will work from class enrollment lists. Instruc- tors are encouraged to send updated lists to 391 Cory as the enroll- ments change. September 1996 -------------- 09/06 - Cochise crashed. Cochise.cs froze up in the afternoon and needed to be rebooted. We are watching for evidence of a bad disk as a possible cause but this is inconclusive so far. The 1GB Seagate disks on Franklin and Cochise have had an increasing failure rate since last Spring. 09/09 - printer problems. We had a series of problems that caused the 2 printers in 274 Soda and the printer in 105 Cory to be offline on Saturday and Sunday. One of the two printers in 274 Soda printers was working again by 7pm on Sunday. There were hardware problems with 2 printers and, by bad coincidence, there were also problems with the spooling software, which the sys admins fixed on Sunday. The failure rate for the printers has increased over the last 2 semesters and the printers are overworked. We are working on a printer quota software suite that should be ready soon. We'll use that to limit usage and to discourage waste and inappropriate use. We will also consider buying a third, more robust printer for the second floor of Soda. Budget is an issue: an HP5SiMx costs about $5000. 09/21 - Franklin.cs was rebooted. Some extremely CPU-intensive user processes brought franklin to a crawl, all but disabling NFS. As a result, 152 students were bogging down, and the Instructional Indy's were unusable. Also, IS&T reported that Franklin was making unnecessary requests to one of its name servers. So, Franklin was rebooted at about 2pm on Saturday afternoon and the problems ceased. 09/26 - printer problems, continued: Instructional printer performance has suffered from hardware failures and unexplained problems in the spooling software. We are working on both, and the staff is being vigilant about correcting software problems when they occur. We are working on a couple of changes that should help; we will try using the latest lpsched spooling daemon on an HP-UX 10.x system, and we will turn at least one printer into a serial printer to bypass the network spooling software altogether. October 1996 ------------ 10/15 - Po was rebooted to clear hung processes. Po had been running smoothly for 80+ days. 10/17 - Pasteur (Instructional mail server) became overloaded with mail processes and was rebooted, causing intermittent interruptions to mail service for an couple of hours. The mail spool directory was full. Excessively large mail spools (over 1MB) were moved and the users were given 24 hours to reduce them, or the staff would delete the spools. We inserted a new command in the standard login script that most students run (/share/b/bin/instructional.cshrc) that warns users if their mail spools are too big. 10/25 - Cochise crashed in the middle of the night and the /home/bb filesystem did not remount automatically. It was manually tested and remounted at about 3am. November 1996 ------------- 11/20 - Franklin and Cochise were both rebooted in the late afternoon to clear problems with their automounters. Downtimes were only about 5 minutes for each reboot. Unrelated to that, console logins were denied at about 1/3 of the HP workstations for a few hours in the morning. This was repaired by midday. 11/22 - Pasteur, the Instructional mail hub, was down for a few hours during the niht and was restored to service by 10am. The mail spool directory had filled up. (end of document)