Netsoc

Red Alert

Anyone else think that netsoc's reliability has been atrocious this year? There was a time years ago when netsoc's reliability made computer services look like fools. It seems more often down now than up, and even when it's up it's the backup machine that seems to be doing the work.

the evil lime

Does seem a bit like that, yeah.

passive

I joined, i got a username and password but..umm..never really found out what to do with it.

Waltons

I'd have to agree. I've rarely been able to use it this year, and during fresher's week there didn't seem to be people at the netsoc stand for most of the day

imp

Yeah it doesn't seem like they've been up to all that much. I seem to be one of about 5 people who're ever on Orca or anything like that. I was hoping to take the trainee program but there doesn't seem to be any movement on it. Hopefully things'll get better next year

Red Alert

The slight shift away from OpenBSD as an OS on the other servers suggests that maybe some of the commitee aren't as well up on tech stuff in general as in previous years. With the amount of hardware they have it just shouldn't be possible for this stuff to occur. A lot of the machines seem to be playthings for the commitee.

generalmiaow

It's pretty brutal alright. The site is falling apart, no webmail, not responding to contact, all my emails randomly got deleted from the server...

Still though, if you want to ssh to anywhere outside ucd from a lab computer on the student network there's not really any other option.

Red Alert

i think the commitee became a bit more obsessed with acting like a stereotypical society rather than doing what they used to do best.

leave the partying to people like engsoc/chemsoc etc.

imp

Netsoc had partying? :eek:

I_Mr_Euphony

Yeah,

I suppose we do have a bit of explaining to do.

This year we had planned to migrate a lot of services away from orca and karma to other servers to take the load off them.
This in itself shouldn't of proven to be that hard but in order to do this we needed to get LDAP working. Now LDAP basically lets you log into any server with your one user/pass stored on one central server.

As well as the migration of email and other stuff, LDAP was vital for the next part of the plan which is FreeNX and noMachine. Allowing you to login to netsoc with a gnome/kde graphical interface from any windows machine in ucd. All you would need is the noMachine client stored on your H drive/flash disk or whatever.

Now as you all know we had orca and karma runnning openBSD, but to much dissapointment we found that it doesn't support LDAP. Its to do with the way the logins are authenticated. So we decided to take the plunge and move over to freeBSD. So this is why we had alot of downtime.

We're only finishing up with getting the servers back up now after the reinstalls since we had a lovely power surge that blew orca up on us and knocked some of the smaller machines out of whack!

But we are recovering and pretty soon we will have it all sorted.

Once again, sorry for the service this year but it wasn't all our fault!
And I'll get onto the commitee and see what we can do about getting some sort of proper society activties organised for you all. Oh yeah and I'll get onto them about the training program.

If you have any difficulty with netsoc or any ideas about events feel free to pm me or email help AT netsoc.com or you can get me at esmurph AT netsoc.com

Cheers,
euph

Red Alert

Yes in fact I can (shockingly) back up everything the guy above says. I've a small server at home for backing up and whatnot, and I really wanted to give OpenBSD (basically it's better than Windows 2000 Server) a spin. I'm a total Linux and UNIX junkie so I wanted everything to be linked up, so when I change my password it magically gets updated on my desktop and laptop. So I went for FreeBSD and never looked back.

Non-nerd expaination of why LDAP's important:
LDAP is a way of storing data about users (and more). UCD in fact uses this to log you into windows pc's (which is why the login screen looks different to yours at home) and into UCD connect. Think of it like a big secure password vault that everyone can access. When you've more than two machines it's really a must.

imp

Thanks for the info Euph.

Your story checks out

imp

Unfortunately its kinda late for them to do anything about this now but I'm kinda irked that only 1 day's notice was given for the AGM last week when the constitution specifies 5, I only found out about it today