College of Engineering EECS Instructional & Electronics Support /usr/pub/reports/manager/Spring_1997 revised 04/08/97 Report on EECS Instructional Computing Facilities ------------------------------------------------- Spring Semester 1997 For a desciption of the current status of Instructional UNIX labs, please see 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/). For additional information, please contact us or our WWW home pages: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu http://www-esg.eecs.berkeley.edu Kevin Mullally Ferenc Kovac EECS Instructional & Electronics EECS Instructional & Electronics 378 Cory Hall, (510) 643-6141 377 Cory Hall, (510) 642-6952 kevinm@eecs.berkeley.edu ferenc@eecs.berkeley.edu Summary of recent events and plans: ---------------------------------- - Rooms 330 Soda and 277 Soda have been converted to new Instructional labs since January 1997. There are 50 new PCs on line now in those rooms, 10 more will be installed this semester. 330 Soda has a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD and NT for various classes; 277 Soda has 30 Solaris systems mainly for CS61B. - 10 PCs have been added to 111 Cory for CS multimedia classes (CS39A, CS294-5). The PCs are running NT and have Intergraph 3-D video cards. - Three new HP 5siMX printers were installed (in 274 Soda and 199 Cory). - A new multimedia lab for faculty has been installed in 564 Soda, under the ausices of Prof John Canny. - CS61A will move to labs in Davis Hall next Fall; those labs will be equiped with 40-60 PCs. That will free up 275 Soda for general use. - John Canny won an Intel grant of 113 PCs and a PC server in October 1996. 69 of them are installed in 3 new labs: 330 and 277 Soda and 111 Cory. The remaining 44 PCs will go into 310 and 349 Davis for CS61A. - Hewlett Packard gave $250,000 worth of instrumentation for the Instructional labs. - DEC has been asked donate 20 new Alphas workstations by July for use by EE classes in Cory Hall. - Prof Newton is coordinating an Intel grant for EE research and Instruct- ion. - Group reorganization: With the breakup of TCS last Fall, the Electron- ics Support Group (under Ferenc Kovac) and the Instructional Support Group (under Kevin Mullally) have been united under a single banner, called the "EECS Instructional & Electronics Group". The primary man- date of this new group is to support the Instructional computer and electronics labs. The unification of the two groups reflects the increasing convergence of computers and AV technology in all instruc- tional labs and allows for a more dynamic distribution of budget and staff amongst the instructional facilities. The group will continue to support AV equipment and recharge services as well. - Staff notes: Monish Sharma (386 Cory), Omar Drubi (377 Cory) and Drina Valdivia are our newest career staff members. Francisco Lopez has reduced his hours to 15% to attend grad school. Sharon Taylor has taken a new position in the Database Research Group in Soda Hall. Marcelino Enriquez, formerly a part-time student, is working full-time from January through August. We haev hired Charles Yang in a part-time to staff the new multimedia lab in 564 Soda. - Open position in Soda: There has been an open PAIII FTE position for Instruction in Soda Hall since October 1996 (replacing Francisco Lopez). We had unsuccessfully sought a multimedia expert. The addition of 70 new PCs and generally increasing demands by CS classes for software custom- ization have made it clear that we need a more general lab support person in this position, so the position is being reposted. (The proposed job decsription is on-line in http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kevinm/jobs.html Notable events this semester ---------------------------- Apr 09 - Cochise crashed, was down from about 4pm-6:30pm. Mar 24 - The new lab of PCs in 330 Soda was opened for students to use. Mar 08 - Pasteur, Ara, Saidar, Saidin, Parker were down for about 1 hour We had to move a number of systems in one of our machine rooms. These systems were down at the given times: Pasteur (email server) --- 3:30-4:30pm Ara & Aristotle (DECstation boot servers) --- 3:00-4:30pm Saidar 134 net interface (home directories) --- 3:30-4:30pm Saidin (DEC Alpha cpu server) --- 3:00-4:30pm Parker (WWW and Xilinx server) --- 6:20-6:35pm Feb 27 - Saidar was down from about 9:15am until 9:30am. It was rebooted intentionally to clear a problem. Saidar is the filesever for /home/b, /home/c, /home/d, /home/m and /share/b. Feb 24 - the 134 subnet was disconnected between 8:45am-9:50am This broke some connections to Pasteur (email server), the NT servers, Saidar, Cory, Po, Volga and Danube. A router interface needed to be restarted. Feb 21 - Po.eecs crashed; down from about 9am-10am Po serves /home/tmp, /home/n and /home/p. They were unavailable from about 9am-10am. Feb 20 - /home/ee, /home/gg, /home/qq were off-line last night They were unavailable from about 5:30pm on Wed 2/19 until 9:30am on Thu 2/20 (16 hours). Cochise had crashed at 5:30pm and these filesystems failed to remount automatically when Cochise rebooted. Feb 1 - The new lab of PCs in 330 Soda was opened for students to use. Sep 09 - The top level of /home/tmp and /home/tmp2 is no longer world writable. Run /share/b/bin/mkhometmpdir on po.eecs or franklin.cs to create a writable subdirectory for yourself in /home/tmp or /home/tmp2. The subdirectory will be named after your login. You will not be permitted to have a directory on both filesystems; whichever one you create first will be the one you use for the semester. Please see /usr/pub/disk.quotas for related information. (end of document)