Need help? If you need help and it is not an emergency, please send e-mail to the "help" e-mail address or make a request from your browser.

Emergency? If you have a problem with the systems and need help urgently, you should take one of the following actions. If you are in or near Nichols Hall, visit one of the systems administrators in N116, N117, or N118 to inform us of the issue. Otherwise, please call 785-532-6350 and ask for a systems administrator. Faculty and staff may also choose to send a page to the systems staff's pagers.

Guide to CIS Systems

  • Computing Facilities - The computing resources cis provides to students.

  • Backups - Information about backups and file recovery.

  • E-Mail - Information on email programs and setup.

New Guide to the CIS Department Systems

We are currently working on a new guide to the CIS Department Systems to reorganize and refresh the content listed above. While the pages are currently under development, you can view them in their current state.

Basics

Web Development

Recent Events

May 19, 2008

New servers to be installed

In our continuing effort to improve services to our department, we will be upgrading, migrating, and/or replacing a handful of servers this summer. The following is a list of servers that will be effected and approximate dates when they will be moved:

  • corvette (MySQL server) - to be replaced - Done, May 19, 2008

  • transam (backup server) - to be replaced - June, 2008
  • delorean (file server) - to be replaced - June, 2008
  • mustang (email server) - to be replaced with virtual server - July, 2008

  • cordoba/ike (printing servers) - virtual servers to be moved to new VMWare server - Done, May 20, 2008

  • harrison (anti-virus server) - virtual server to be moved to new VMWare server - Done, May 21, 2008

  • camaro (shell server) - to be replaced - June, 2008 - Done, June 16, 2008

We will send out periodic as we get closer to completing each of these migrations. Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we complete these tasks.

Seth

October 1, 2007

The old print server has finally been decommissioned. Lab users should notice no difference. Individuals may need to reinstall their printers by following the documentation elsewhere in the support wiki: http://support.cis.ksu.edu/UserGuide/Printing

Please note the above Printing guide has been updated significantly for Mac users.

Please send email to help@cis.ksu.edu if you have problems using the new print server.

Seth

August 31, 2007

We're at the start of another semester and there's a couple of announcements that the support staff would like to bring to your attention. First of all, with each new semester comes a new password. The CTS deadline for changing your password is September 12th so make sure you get to http://eid.ksu.edu before then and update your password. You should also be changing your CIS password, so don't forget to do that as well. If you forget and your account gets disabled you can always visit the Support Staff offices in N116, N117 or N118. If you just signed up for a CIS account this semester you do not need to change your password.

Some students have been experiencing trouble using our SelfServ system. Many of these problems were cause by our out-dated SSL certificate that we were using. We have issued a new certificate so that this will not cause any more problems. However, it has been reported that some people have been receiving errors after logging into selfserv. If you run into this problem please email help@cis.ksu.edu with details so we can try and resolve this as quickly as possible.

Of course, if you ever have problems with the CIS computer systems, you can send an email to help@cis.ksu.edu and we'll try our best to help you. Good luck in your studies and have a good semester.

Jesse Printz

April 26, 2007

We have made a major change in how using network printers in the department works. The main improvement is that Linux users (in the computing labs and office workstations) can now print directly to a printer from any application, rather than printing to a file and using one of the hp* scripts.

All the printers have new names as well. They should be fairly easy to identify, as the new name includes first the room number, and then the model of the printer.

For those Linux users who wish to print files on the commandline, you should now start using lpr instead of the hp* scripts, which have been removed.

Full details on usage can be found on the support wiki: http://support.cis.ksu.edu/UserGuide/Printing

Windows users can still use the old method for now as that will still work for you. In the next few days, we will update all the Windows workstations to use the new system.

Please email or call support if you have any questions or problems.

February 12, 2007

Have you changed your eID password yet? The deadline for this semester is this Wednesday, February 14. If you don't change your password, CTS will do it for you.

Go to http://eid.ksu.edu to change your password today and beat the deadline.

February 10, 2007

We have created additional storage space on the fileserver for the sole purpose of storing VMWare virtual system images. We hope to be able to give access to these images as necessary for student and faculty who want to use them for classes and research. Our goal is to build a library of various systems so that you can choose one that fits your needs. These images are intended for short-term temporary use only, such as a for single semester. Virtual images will be available on a workstation or server basis. If you have virtualization needs beyond that, please let us know and we will try to accommodate you.

Please note that we ware still working out the details, but hope to have the process streamlined for issuing access to these images very soon. We will publish a list of available images as they are available.

September 10, 2006

Those of you who tried to connect to our systems over the weekend may have some difficulty doing so. Due to a problem updating packages on our linux machines, we ended up reinstalling all of them. This effort started early Saturday morning and continued late into the Sunday evening. Systems that were effected by this include all linux lab machines, some faculty machines, some student machines, and the main shell server. By this time, only three lab machines that had hardware malfunctions, and a few student machines are left to be reinstalled. We expect to be able to finish those Monday and Tuesday.

As a result of the main shell server being reinstalled, new ssh keys were generated for that host. Because of this, you may get error messages when trying to connect to it via ssh. Users who are connecting to it from Windows using putty, should just get a notice and query to update your local stored key. If aksed, simply answer Yes or OK and it should be resolved. Users who are connecting to it from a linux or unix host will need to remove the line for it from their ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. This server has many names. Search for any of the following in your known_hosts file so you know which line to delete:

  • linux.cis.ksu.edu
  • unix.cis.ksu.edu
  • cislinux.cis.ksu.edu
  • cisunix.cis.ksu.edu
  • camaro.cis.ksu.edu
  • or IP address: 129.130.10.111

You may also find just the hostname without the FQDN in that file.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused and hope to avoid this in the future. If you have any questions regarding this or any other issue, please send an email to help@cis.ksu.edu.

Seth

July 19, 2006

As you have probably noticed we have deployed a new support site. We were having several issues with the old site and it was proving difficult to maintain. We believe that this new system we have setup will fix these issues. Since all the account management features were integrated into the old site, we've rewritten these features and they can be accessed via the SelfServ tab at the top of this site or directly with the URL http://selfserv.cis.ksu.edu. We hope that these changes will be smooth for all of our users, but if you're having trouble accessing or using the new site, please feel free to send a help request.

Jesse

May 23, 2006

Greetings,

After a late night, Travis and I think we have licked the PHP problem. To spare you the details, we found some deeply hidden configuration parameters, that once we were able to correct them, things seemed to stabilize considerably. The server has now been running for well over 12 hours without failing. As far as we can tell, php pages seem to be delivering properly, so our changes don't seem to have been detrimental. Please let us know if you are having any problems with your various and sundry web pages.

Thanks again for your patience while we have been troubleshooting this problem.

Seth

May 22, 2006

We will be shutting the web server down this evening at 6:00 to run some hardware diagnostics. The server could be down for one to two hours.

Thank you for your continued patience.

Seth

May 22, 2006

As you all have noticed, the PHP upgrade didn't go as well as we had hoped last week. The new version seems to have an incompatibility problem with the installed version of glibc, which is the standard C library. As a result, the PHP engine would cause glibc to crash, which would in turn hang the apache web server. When apache is hung, then no web pages get delivered until it is restarted. By Friday afternoon, this was happening almost hourly. Since we were here, we could restart it easily. In an effort to make sure the department web server was still running through the weekend, I decided to disable PHP entirely. This does not affect 95% of the department site, but does impact many faculty and student web pages.

I certainly appreciate your frustration. Believe me, I'm not having a picnic either. Our RT site is effectively down for the duration as well. Support emails are still being delivered, but we are unable to do any of the web management until PHP is fixed. And I am certainly aware that many faculty and project pages depend on PHP to run. I and both students who are here for the summer worked on this problem all day Friday, and will likely work on it all today. This is our top priority right now. In the meantime, PHP may be up or down periodically.

If we cannot get this resolved soon, we will move the entire web server to another machine temporarily while we proceed with our original plan to migrate web services across multiple machines. This was a project we had intended to complete over the summer. If technical difficulties persist, it will simply get done sooner than later.

I appreciate your continued patience as we work this out.

Seth

May 16, 2006

A security bulletin was issued recently regarding a vulnerability with the use of the PHP scripting language used by may web applications, including those on our department web server. We would like to upgrade our PHP packages accordingly.

There are two caveats to this. The first is that to upgrade to a patched version of 4.x (the version we currently run), it will mean approximately one hour of downtime for any of your pages that use PHP. At this time, those pages that use PHP will be inaccessible.

The second caveat is that there is actually a newer version of PHP, 5.x, that we will probably want to upgrade to in the near future. However, there are some incompatibilities between the two versions.

In the interest of security, I would like to upgrade the 4.x version tomorrow afternoon. Since we are now in summer break, the impact should be minimal. By the end of the summer, I would like to migrate to the newer 5.x version. Please look at your PHP-enabled pages in the meantime and make sure that they will be compatible when that switch is made. A summary of the changes can be found here:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php

Please let me know by noon tomorrow if you need me to postpone the upgrade. Otherwise, we will proceed at that time.

Thank you. Seth

May 3, 2006

Jesse Printz rocked the new CIS Support site by customizing a cool looking theme! Click around and have a gander...



There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those that can read binary, and those that cannot.

Support Staff

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Seth Galitzer
Systems Manager

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Earl Harris
Hardware Specialist

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Mark Pelcak
Student Administrator

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Joel Cunningham
Student Administrator

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Bryce Johnston
Student Administrator