Hello!
Summer is upon us and so it has become time for the 2021 summer newsletter. There’s plenty to cover this time as the past six months have been both eventful and busy at GenomeDK.
We wish you all a great summer vacation!
Anders, Rasmus, and Dan
The GenomeDK Team
Recent instability
As a lot of you have noticed, we have recently experienced stability issues. One of the servers hosting your home folders unexpectedly rebooted, which caused several issues when the server came back up again. Attempting to fix it, we updated the software on the server which required a few reboots, which prevented users on that server from logging in.
The server is now stable again. During the next planned downtime, we will fully reinstall the server to ensure that no bad configuration/software is left there.
We’re shutting down /com/extra!
Yes, it’s finally happening. After three years of recommending other means of installing and managing your software, we’re shutting down /com/extra, our legacy software archive, on August 16th! You’ve already received an e-mail about this, so this is just a gentle reminder to go back and re-read it, if you’re still using /com/extra.
Disk-based backup
The amount of data in backup has increased significantly over the past years, to the point where backup is a very significant post in our budget. Unfortunately, this leaves less money for buying new and replacing old equipment. To counter this, we are now working to replace our tape-based backup provided by AU IT, with a new disk-based backup solution. This will allow us to provide much more functionality to end-users and significantly reduce the cost of backup.
We expect the new solution to go into production within the next three months. We will of course provide more information and updated documentation once it goes live!
Terms of service
Over the past year, we have worked hard to formalize our information security framework at GenomeDK. As part of this work, we have developed a terms document. We do this to provide more transparency about the services we provide, which should benefit you, the users.
Note that by using the services provided by GenomeDK, you’ll automatically be agreeing to the terms.
We do what we can to protect you and your data at GenomeDK. There’s a few things that you can do to help us:
Are you registered with a correct e-mail?
We use your e-mail to contact you about planned downtimes, outages, significant changes, password resets, this newsletter, and many other things. We also use it to notify you if your account is about to be deactivated. Please make sure that you’re registered with a functioning e-mail that you check regularly!
Run this:
[fe1]$ finger $(whoami)
to check what your e-mail address is currently. I you wish to change it, please get in touch via support@genome.au.dk.
Check if your password has been compromised
If you reused your password for GenomeDK somewhere else, your password may have been leaked. A reliable source of password leaks is https://haveibeenpwned.com, which can tell you, based on your e-mail address, whether your password has been compromised.
See Changing your password if you want to change your password.
Workshops
As the Danish society is slowly opening up again and most people have been vaccinated, we will again be doing physical workshops after the summer vacation. If your research group needs a workshop, get in touch!
Learn using GPU’s on HPC
Some of our colleagues from AU and SDU are doing a workshop on AI on HPC. If this has your interest, there’s still open seats and it’s entirely online:
https://www.gpuhackathons.org/event/interactive-hpc-dk-ai-science-gpu-bootcamp
Thank you for reading!