Author Archives: Catherine E. Pitt

Upcoming OpenVPN changes

Many people in the department use our OpenVPN service to get access to the Chemistry network when they are not physically in the building. If you use OpenVPN, you need to make some changes before 22nd October 2015 to ensure … Continue reading

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Intel 2016 compilers available

No you didn’t read that wrong, and the year is still 2015 as I write this. Intel have released a new major version of their Fortran and C/C++ compiler software, called Composer XE 2016. It will become available on managed … Continue reading

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MATLAB 2015A

MATLAB 2015A is now available for installation on our managed Windows workstations. Please email support@ch.cam.ac.uk if you would like it installing. Unfortunately the sheer size of the package means it’s not possible to simply install this one from our web … Continue reading

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Recent problems with network services

A failure of a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) on Wednesday March 25th caused faults on a number of infrastructure machines. This affected most of the services that provide network access in Chemistry, although in most cases only for a short … Continue reading

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MATLAB2014b and locale on Ubuntu

This week we were trying to make the new MATLAB R2014b package available on the managed Linux workstations. The new version persistently produced an error message about locales when run on my test machine. However it worked fine on another … Continue reading

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Chemical waste

Recently the batteries failed abruptly in one of our UPSes. When we came to replace them it was very obvious why. Here’s the battery pack immediately after removing from the UPS. The batteries are meant to be flat on top … Continue reading

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Keep your systems up to date!

A timely warning from the University Information Service: Various high profile data security exploits have made the news recently. Please apply all available software updates and patches (for the operating system and all installed apps) to your devices: desktop computers, … Continue reading

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New Portland compilers

Version 14.9 of the Portland Group compiler suite is now rolling out on managed Linux workstations running Ubuntu 14.04 and managed clusters. If you are running the older managed Linux image based on Ubuntu 12.04 and want access to the … Continue reading

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New Intel compilers and version number confusion

This week we’ve installed two new versions of the Intel Compiler suite on the Linux workstations and clusters. Because all compilers and codes have their quirks, we try to keep several different versions of each compiler available at all times. … Continue reading

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Server room update

Some of you may have been following the saga of our server room refurbishment. The main part of the refurbishment has been done for a while and we even took pictures of the process, but we haven’t posted them until … Continue reading

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