As one can surmise by the title, as well as for anyone who cares to check the history of these things, my aspirations of a monthly newsletter have evolved into “Every other month isn’t too bad, right?”  Polite readers will refrain from pointing out it’s already May. Perhaps, with all the happenings this newsletter is …

This announcement pertains to macOS users. We’ve received word from DHS that macOS Monterey (macOS 12), must be upgraded to 12.3.1 by April 25. Here’s what you need to know: If your Mac is fully managed (by either CELS Systems or BIS Desktop Support), the upgrade will be scheduled for you and you will be …

A critical security update is needed on all our gitlab servers. We will start the patching at 5:00 PM. For each system, we expect the outage to be 30 minutes, with all servers complete by 6:30 PM. During this time, any connection issues you experience with any of gitlab.cels.anl.gov, git.cels.anl.gov, and xgitlab.cels.anl.gov are to be …

There is a zero day vulnerability in Chrome that Google has issued a patch for.  If you’re running Chrome, you must update as soon as possible.  We’ve sent notifications to the managed and co-managed Macs we run. To make sure you’re at the latest version, Chrome users can visit chrome://settings/help.  If you need an update, …

Due to an emergency patch recommendation from gitlab, we will be applying upgrades to the gitlab servers we run today. xgitlab.cels.anl.gov (legacy), gitlab.cels.anl.gov (internal Legacy) and git.cels.anl.gov (GCE) will all be getting upgrades starting around noon today. In each case, the outage should last 30-45 minutes. Sorry for the short notice, such is the world …

Hi, everybody! First up, apologies for no update newsletter in January. There’s a whole lot happening, and things got a bit hectic, meaning I let this slide long enough it’s now a February newsletter (and barely, at that). Let’s just dive right into the important bits of info I’m sure you’re curious about. (more…)

The majority of the GCE compute nodes have been rebuilt and are back online at this time. We have also added a few nodes with this work. Please see virtualhelpdesk.cels.anl.gov/docs/linux/login-compute-and-home-nodes/ for an updated list of current hostnames/configurations as some nodes have been renumbered. As most of the nodes are now running ubuntu 20.04, if you …

On Monday, Feb 14, 9:30am CST, we will be taking down the following GCE compute nodes: compute-03.cels.anl.gov, compute-04.cels.anl.gov, compute-05.cels.anl.gov and compute-06.cels.anl.gov for system upgrades. This upgrade will require about 4 hours of downtime. When they come back up, they will be running the most recent GCE compute/workstation build (Ubuntu 20.04). This will not affect data …

An urgent security patch is needed on all the linux systems in GCE which requires a reboot.  Beginning at 5PM this evening, we will start rolling these patches out.  This will affect all GCE compute nodes, home nodes, login nodes, and workstations.  In each case, the outage will be as long as it takes for …

We’ve got to apply some security patches to our WordPress server that will require a brief outage.  We’re scheduling this for 5PM Central Standard Time tomorrow, January 13th.  It should take all of ten minutes, but we’ll call the maintenance window an hour just in case something goes awry and we need to roll back. …