Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 00:12:57 +0200 From: Marc Hemberger Subject: IT News @ BioQuant (May/09) To: BIOQUANT-USERS@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE Dear colleagues, This months newsletter on IT @ Bioquant deals with the following very different topics: Printing @ BioQuant DKFZ Policy for BioQuant Group Shares New colleague in IT Printing @ BioQuant In this section I address three special topics related to printing. First, Printing on the A0 plotter: we are very happy to be able to offer the service of a poster plotter, currently located in 054. But as we experienced in the last months, this printing device can be a cause of a lot of headaches. To avoid this trouble both on your and our side, we recommend the following procedure for printing poster on our plotter: - Pass by at our usual office hours "well in advance" to the deadline of your poster session (this might be difficult, but usually meetings don't happen suddenly) to clarify the procedure. 2 to 3 days are enough. - Bring in your poster on a USB stick or similar. We will print it for you in time. This will save your time, some paper and a lot of ink plus our sanity. - As a last resort, we still will register your account name on the print server, so that you can print at any time you wish. But we can not take any guarantee, that a 1 am on a Sunday morning the plotter is in perfect shape. - It is up to you. Make your choice. Second, if you want to check the status of any printer at BioQuant, you can check the web page at http://quantinfra.bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de:631. This can help you in troubleshooting: is my job already printing or is paper missing ... And last: we monitor the printers on a regular basis. That is, missing paper, no toner, all this causes at a certain level a mail to us well in advance to a possible failure. Then we will deposit (i.e. the Betriebsleitung will) a new toner cartridge or sufficient paper into the printer room. And finally, it is up to you to do the replacement, as it is described on the sticker on each printer. DKFZ Policy for BioQuant The DKFZ ZDV and BioQuant IT have agreed on a policy on how to deal with DKFZ computers at BioQuant. The main issue: we will integrate all DKFZ PCs one after another into the Active Directory of BioQuant. This gives both of us the flexibility we need to give optimal support to the DKFZ scientists at BioQuant. First level support will be done by us (as it is already today), if problems are not related to BioQuant, the DKFZ ZDV can be contacted (as it is already the case now). Group Shares Just a simple reminder: if you have large amounts of data to store, we offer for every group at BioQuant disk space. Just ask your group leader to drop me a note with the required size, then we can provide that storage space for your scientific projects. Currently we host group shares from 500 GB to several TB of data. And we are not yet at the end of our capacity. But as always: there are no voids, free space will be filled. New colleague in IT Probably you have seen already a black-clothed guy in and around the IT office. Georgios Nikolis joined the IT group as of May 1. He has some expertise in cluster management and is now learning how IT works in a very much larger environment as he had been before. And he will support you in all possible areas, from Linux, Unix, to Mac and Windows. New IT@BioQuant Webpage We reorganized the IT web page a little bit. Please take a look, and bookmark it, this is the location to find information about the past, current and future IT developments at BioQuant: And as usual: our mail address for your problems is support-it@bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de. Greetings, Marc Dr. Marc Hemberger Leiter der EDV / Head of IT Fon: +49 6221/54-51-300 BioQuant / INF 267 marc.hemberger@bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Fax: +49 6221/54-51-480 69120 Heidelberg http://www.bioquant.uni-heidelberg.de