Please see this post for the original announcement.  Various systems will begin shutting down on the schedules set by their systems administration team which should have been announced to the users of those systems. For CELS, the affected systems (primarily the MCS Legacy environment) we will begin the shutdown on Sunday, May 7, at 6PM. Presuming …

Attention Apple users: Yesterday, Apple began rolling out rapid security response updates for macOS and iOS/iPadOS.  You can read a little more detail on it here, but the crux of it is when your computer/phone tells you about the update, please do not put it off.  For machines fully managed by CELS Systems, we’ll keep …

Hi, everyone! I want to let you know about a couple of outages/upgrades that are happening. First the easy one — we’ll be rebuilding any GCE Ubuntu 18.04 machines into Ubuntu 22.04 starting next week. On April 24 we’ll be doing homes-01.cels.anl.gov, compute-01.cels.anl.gov, and compute-02.cels.anl.gov. On April 26 we’ll do homes-02.cels.anl.gov. In all of these …

This morning, we got reports of mail sent to addresses in “mcs.anl.gov” from outside Argonne were not making it to us. A brief investigation showed that the Domain Name Service (DNS) records that identify where mail should be delivered (MX records) were missing for mcs.anl.gov.  We replaced the records, and now the DNS servers are …

Hey, look!  It’s spring, everyone! What’s your favorite part of spring arriving?  Mine is temps in the 30s with some rain! I wanted to write a brief update on our Crowdstrike rollout across CELS, getting us in line with a whole slew of mandates and Presidential Directives.  For background, see the January announcement and March …

Hi, everyone!  Happy March!  We’re going to have a few short announcements regarding the EDR rollout over the course of the month as we get things put into place across the various operating systems we have.  For background, see my previous EDR announcement. This first one is for macOS.  For all managed and co-managed machines, we’re …

Hi, everyone! Hope you’re enjoying your February so far!  It’s almost over, but I’m actually getting a newsletter out in the month I intend it to come out, so I want to acknowledge that and pat myself on the back a little bit.  Good job, Craig!  Thanks, Craig! Okay, on to the important stuff.  I …

Hi, folks! I’ve got a few updates and timelines related to the CELS General Computing Environment, but I’ll go over them in a follow-up next week.  Right now, I want to let you know about some updated requirements that have come to us from Washington.  Executive Order 14028 from May 2021 required all agencies to …

A maintenance window of our GitLab services has been planned for January 4 at 5pm in order to update the software. GitLab services provided by git.cels.anl.gov, gitlab.cels.anl.gov and xgitlab.cels.anl.gov will be unavailable during the maintenance. Service is expected to be restored by 6pm. If this window poses undue inconvenience, please let us know, we can …

Hi, everyone! It’s been too long since I’ve written one of these, so we’ve got a lot to go over. I’m going to try to keep this brief, since I’m fully aware that if I unleash a firehose of information at you, what I’ll end up with is a lot of confused people who only know they’re wet and don’t understand why. (more…)