The Departmental Teaching Computer System has been migrated from HP-UX to the Linux operating system over the summer and we have installed new terminals in the DPO. It is of the utmost importance that those responsible for classes or practicals which make any use of the Teaching System test their software well in advance of its use in teaching to ensure that there are no compatibility problems (whether they expect to run locally on the terminals or on the servers). The current setup in the DPO is just as we expect it to be next term so please try it out. Any problems, however minor, should be reported to teaching-support@eng.cam.ac.uk.
There are many small programs and utilities currently installed on the old HP-UX systems, which have accumulated over many years. Except for those which are obviously essential for teaching or research, no guarantee can be made that these have/will be transferred to Linux but requests can be made to sys-admin@eng.cam.ac.uk and these will be dealt with when time permits.
Please let teaching-support@eng.cam.ac.uk know if you find that something which needs to be used in teaching (or is of widespread usefulness) is missing from the new system.
The Department's external access machines (club and punch) will soon become Linux-based servers. We will retain 2 servers, to provide redundancy, but the service they provide will be accessible via a single name - gate.eng.cam.ac.uk. The names "club" and "punch" will continue to work for the foreseeable future but we encourage users to connect to "gate" by preference.
Whilst there should be little practical difference for most users, customisations (eg to .profile and .bashrc) may cause problems and these are most easily solved in the short term by removing these. In order to provide a temporary fallback in case of more serious problems, club will be converted on Friday 22nd September and punch on Tuesday 26th September. Please report problems to sys-admin@eng.cam.ac.uk.
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