HMC Mathematics Computing Weblog

The power finally came back on at about 12:30 AM, six-and-a-half hours after F&M's estimate, and eight-and-a-half hours after CIS's.

Most of the servers came back up fine, but the backup server was recalcitrant. I got it running manually, but will have to spend some more time looking into it when I get back.

Workstations should all be up and running normally; please let me know if you notice unusual behavior.

I fixed some wacky X configs in the lab and swapped one monitor for one of the ones that seemed to be bad -- looks like we may need to replace some video cards in some of the machines. Again, I'll look into it when I get back.

There are a few more details I'll need to attend to tomorrow. It's nearly 3:00 AM now, and I think I'll go to bed. Cheers.

For those of you who like to live dangerously, or at least like to dance around a bit near the edge, I have installed a recent (today's, actually) CVS GNU Emacs for you to play with.

CVS Emacs has some really cool features. Among them, it's prettier, with a GTK interface and a much better scrollbar. And it finally supports drag-and-drop, so you can drag a URL from Mozilla directly into an Emacs buffer. Other features I've run across include defaulting to the last search-and-replace operation with query-replace (M-%), some nice new AUC-TeX and RefTeX features, and a bunch of stuff related to MIME handling with MH-E that no one but me is likely to care about, but trust me, it's good stuff.

To give it a whirl, add

/shared/local/emacs-cvs/bin/

to your PATH with a command such as

setenv PATH /shared/local/emacs-cvs/bin:${PATH} (for {t,}csh)
or export PATH /shared/local/emacs-cvs/bin:${PATH} (for bash)
(Hardcore sh and ksh users presumably already know what they need to do.)

You can add those commands to your startup files (.tcshrc or .cshrc for tcsh or csh, respectively; .bashrc for bash; .profile for sh; etcetera).

I will rebuild the release periodically, and, because it's development code, it may break. If it does, you can revert to the old system Emacs by removing the CVS Emacs path from your path.

F & M has announced a power outage on Saturday, December 18, from 6:00 AM through 4:00 PM. Because of the length of this outage, the department's servers will be unavailble during this time period.

As a result, web services, along with e-mail, printing, and file services, will be unavailble. All workstations will be powered off.

I will be shutting down workstations located in the Scientific Computing and Clinic Labs the night before the outage. I will also shut down any faculty workstations left running at that time.

You can guarantee the integrity of your data by logging out of your workstations prior to 6:00 PM on Friday, December 17.

I will plan to be on campus Saturday evening to get servers and lab workstations running again. (Probably around 6:00 PM.)

Thanks for your cooperation.