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Recent Updates

None

We apologize for the lack of notification and the lack of status updates, and are grateful for your patience. As you may have guessed, this is not a planned outage.

On April 19th, we discovered that one of our servers had been broken into. We initially tried to contain the problem, but further investigation revealed that the scope of the break-in was worse than we had originally thought. At our Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, April 23, it was decided that many, if not all, of the OCF servers would need to be rebuilt, to reduce the possibility that the hacker would be able to break back into our systems. Because of the nature of the incident, in the interests of security and damage control, the decision was made to begin reconstruction efforts immediately, rather than waiting the customary week to give notification.

Starting that night, various servers have been pulled from the network for forensic analysis and re-installation. However, we have been delayed in restarting some of our services due to an unforeseen difficulty in rebuilding one of our core servers. Until that issue is cleared up, we will be unable to resume anything approaching normal service.

For those of you worried about mail, the mail servers are continuing to accept incoming mail, and it will be available for pick-up once normal services resume.

I'm very sorry that I cannot give you a more solid timeframe than "soon." Please, rest assured that we are doing our very best to bring the OCF back online, and all of our senior technical staff are hard at work fixing this roadblock to normalcy. We ask your patience and understanding, noting that all our staff are volunteers and students who, like you, have class and work obligations, especially with finals looming ever closer.

As always, you are welcome to join us on the OCF IRC channel, irc.ocf.berkeley.edu, with questions, concerns, or anything else you think we should know.

OCF downtime

The OCF login servers (conquest and apocalypse) and lab machines are currently down for maintenance, and many services in the lab itself are unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and the delay in communicating this, and hope to be able to provide more details soon.

Unexpected downtime

Sometime this morning, our core fileserver started having some disk issues. We're working on figuring out what exactly went wrong and fixing it, but in the meantime, the OCF is effectively down (no lab, no SSH, no web, etc). We'll post updates as we have them.

UPDATE: The problem seems to have been fixed, though we're still not entirely sure what it was. We'll keep working on it throughout the day. In the meantime, though, the OCF is back up and ready for business.

RIP Logjam, You Were a Good Printer

logjam, our HP LaserJet 4350 laser printer, died over the weekend. It's out of warranty, so we're currently exploring our options. In the mean time, we've brought one of our old printers back into service.


We apologize for the disruption in service and slower printing you may experience while we work on fixing/replacing our primary printer.

Yes We Can Upgrade Quotas

Good news: we're providing storage stimulus by upgrading all user disk space quotas to 2 GB.

Bad news: to enact this change, the OCF will be unavailable between 12 AM, Friday, February 27 and 8 AM, Monday, March 2 (just over 72 hours).

We know three days is a long time, but the prolonged downtime is necessary to ensure the safety of user data while we perform our upgrades. Delivering data reliability you can believe in is important to us.

We're hoping this will be the first of many upgrades for our users. Who knows? With the new lab, this could signal a new beginning

OCF Lab Reopening!

The OCF lab will be reopening on Monday, February 9. We have a shiny new lab in the basement of Eshleman Hall, a cool lounge just for hanging out, and Airbears!


So come by to check it out next week, and thank you for being so patient with us for the past seven months!

Unexpected Downtime

We're currently experiencing some hardware problems on one of our core servers. We are investigating the issue and will post updates here as we determine the scope of the problem.


UPDATE: Disk array issues again. We're running a check on the data, and we expect to be back online tomorrow morning. Sorry for the inconvenience. We understand that it's a school night, so please let us know (sm @ ocf.berkeley.edu) if you need emergency access to your files.

UPDATE (1:01 AM): The check completed successfully, and we're bringing all OCF services back right now. Let us know if you notice anything strange with your files.

General Meeting on February 5

The OCF will be holding a general meeting next Thursday, February 5th, at 7 PM in 189 Dwinelle. Hear the latest updates on our lab relocation, meet the staff who volunteer daily to keep your services running, and elect this semester's OCF managers.


Everyone's invited, so come on by for food and socializing!

Login Server Upgrades

We just upgraded the operating system of one of our login servers, conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU. The machine now is available for general use and will be re-added to our login server alias once we're sure that everything works. Feel free to give the server a test drive, but please note that we might have to reboot it a few times in the coming days.

This operating system upgrade allows us to deliver greater security and better application support to our users. In fact, I'm pleased to announce that we now support Mercurial, a popular distributed version control system.

We'll also be upgrading apocalypse.OCF.Berkeley.EDU soon. If you really need a place to work uninterrupted this weekend, you can try our Linux login server, tsunami.OCF.Berkeley.EDU.