Csadmin

If there is a systems emergency during non-business hours, please contact the emergency hotline (434-982-2271); there is contact information on the hotline for reaching staff at home if no information is posted there. If you aren't sure what constitutes an emergency, please click here.

Emergency Downtime - Apollo - 5:30PM 4/9/10

The chassis for apollo now has two failed cooling fans; this is causing one CPU to run extremely hot, and has caused two spontaneous reboots.

We need to swap out the fans (the entire chassis in this instance).

If the system reboots again spontaneously, we will shut it down and do the swap immediately; if it remains up until 5:30PM, we will take it down then.

Total downtime should be less than 10 minutes.

UPDATE: Apollo crashed again around 3PM, so we went ahead with the replacment. We are now up on new hardware.

None.

Policy change for music/video files on webserver - 2/11/10

In the past year, our webserver has become unresponsive on a couple of occasions as a result of music/video files in users' webspace being indexed by search engine Baidu. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China; when media files on our server get listed by them, we see a huge uptick in GET requests for these files. One file, found by Baidu this week, currently accounts for 30% of the GET requests on www.cs.virginia.edu. While the file was available for download, the webserver almost completely ran out of swap space and was nearly unresponsive.

To protect against this effect in the future, we've made two policy changes to the webserver:

• Configuring Apache, by default, not to serve particular media file types nor show them in directory listings. Currently, mp3 and rmvb (a popular Asian video format) files fall into this category; more may be added in the future, as needed. If you need to serve these files for legitimate research/instructional purposes, it's easy to override that restriction by adding to your .htaccess file:
  
  <Files *.mp3>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

• Adding 'Disallow' statements for mp3 and rmvb files to robots.txt. Not all major search spiders respect wildcarding in 'Disallow' (i.e., *.mp3), and we're unsure how Baidu handles that, so it remains to be seen whether this will be an effective measure.

Pompey - 1/20/10

Pompey has recently been removed from the department as a shared resource (including PBS queues). It is currently being used exclusively by a research group and will be returned to the general department pool as soon as possible.

MySQL Server Upgrade - 1/15/10

We recently ugraded MySQL to V. 5.1.39, 64-bit. We made this change to bring in InnoDB table support and to pick up some security fixes. We will do a more extensive update later in this year - to bring ourselves forward to the current 5.5 release. This is essentially a maintenance update.

Solaris System Perl Upgrade - 1/15/10

In order to accomodate some newer web based packages, we have upgraded the CS Solaris PERL to 5.10. All earlier versions remain and may be called explicitly. The default is now 64-bit Perl 5.10. If you are running Perl scripts from /usr/cs/bin/perl and they are suddenly missing a needed module which we'd previously installed for you, please send mail to root so that we can add that package.

By e-mail: root@cs.virginia.edu
Emergency hotline: 982-2271 (What constitutes an emergency?)
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