HMC Mathematics Computing Weblog

I have completed the repairs to our primary server, and everything should be working as usual. If not, please let me know!

We have a hardware problem with our main server, esme, which requires me to take the machine offline in order to replace some parts.

I will shut the server down at 2:00 PM tomorrow, Saturday, January 20. The work will either take about twenty minutes or will require much more extensive part swapping, which could take several hours. Please check this blog (which will remain available) for updates and notification about everything being back on line.

Because the problem is with our primary server, e-mail, logins, and printing will not be available during the outage. Home directories will also not be available, so class websites hosted out of professors' home directories (which is most of them) will also not be available during the outage. Our web server is a separate machine and will remain available, with all content not kept in home directories.

Sorry for the inconvenience and short notice; I've only just received the necessary parts.

I have installed a preview release of MATLAB R2007a on our system for testing. The official release of this software should occur in March, 2007.

R2007a includes a number of bug fixes and some new features. Release notes with more detailed information are available within the help files for this release; run MATLAB, then choose Help->MATLAB Help; then click on Release Notes for MATLAB 2007a.

Testing R2007a

You can run the R2007a release by typing

/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin/matlab

at a shell prompt. The preview release includes all toolboxes, so there isn't a separate installation for the research and classroom licenses.

Running the Test Version All the Time

From now on, I expect that we will be maintaining links to a testing version of MATLAB at all times. When a newer version is not available, the links will simply point to the current release.

If you want to run the most cutting edge version of MATLAB that we have available, you can add one of the testing paths to your PATH environment variable. I recommend that you put the testing path near the head of your PATH so that it isn't overridden by the older version that is set automatically by our shell defaults.

The correct magic incantations to add these paths are

• For csh and variants: % setenv PATH /shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH
• For Bourne shell variants: set PATH="/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH"; export PATH
• For bash, zsh, and newer shells, you may be able to do export PATH="/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH"

Our Schedule

We are dependent on CIS updating their license servers with the licenses for new releases, so exactly when we'll be able to move to the official release is a bit up in the air. In recent times, I've been able to get them to install the newer licenses in parallel with the older licenses so that we can run the newest release but their labs with older installation don't need to be updated.