Final ICS Account/ICS Gsuite password synchronization has been delayed until 1/5/2021. Unexpected messages were received during a test run of the new account synchronization. Out of an abundance of caution we have delayed implementation until after the break while we work with our Google support team to ensure the notifications are harmless.

On January 5, 2021 ICS Computing Support will begin managing ICS account passwords and ICS Gsuite passwords separately. Most users will not immediately notice this change. But this change means that, in the future, in order to change your ICS Gsuite passwords you will use a new tool. There will be no changes to the way that ICS account passwords are managed.

• To change the password for your campus ICS account, please continue using https://password.ics.uci.edu
• To change the password for your ICS Gsuite account, please log in to your ICS Gsuite account and use this Google Tool

Please send questions and comments to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu.

In early December 2020, the CentOS project announced an abrupt change to it's CentOS8 and future relapse roadmap. The CentOS8 end of life has been moved up to December 2021 (about three years before CentOS7 in 2024).

As a direct result, ICS Computing Support is suspending CentOS8 installation immediately. We are considering a replacement distro for ICS Servers. Licensed RHEL8 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS the chief candidates. If you have opinions, requirements, or goals you would like to share with us, please send email to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu.

ICS Computing Support Criteria:

• Package based with security updates
• Multi-year roadmap
• Unattended installation
• Vendor Support
• Puppet Support
• Security focused
• Broad community adoption and support
• Low cost

The following packages have been updated in the ICS Software Library for Winter Quarter

• anaconda/2020.11
• vault/1.6.0
• go/1.15.6
• singularity/3.7.0

Grafana Metrics: Statistics are being collected and graphed via Prometheus and Grafana. Charts are available to view at the following URL(Please login using your ICS credentials).

https://grafana.ics.uci.edu:3000/

Grafana @ ICS

Staff and faculty have been editor access to the grafana dashboards. Faculty and supervisors may send mail to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu in order to request additonal privilege for students.

All other users have been granted viewer permissions.

We are currently running the base Prometheus node_exporter as well as the Postfix SMTP exporter. Feel free to send requests for additional dashboards or editors to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu.

In order to reduce contention for resources on the ICS OpenGPU cluster (currently consisting of a single node, poison.ics.uci.edu) we will be disabling the SGE queue. Please use the SLURM@ICS queue instead. Send email messages to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu for help converting your SGE scripts to SLURM.

ICS is changing its spam and malware scanning policy to streamline delivery to external mail providers.

Who will this affect: This affects any user that forwards their ICS email to an external mail provider (e.g. @gmail.com, @hotmail.com)

Who will this not affect: Any mail that is delivered locally or through ICS Gsuite.

When: Initial changes were made 10/23/2020. Changes will be complete on 10/27/2020.

How do I opt out: Faculty, staff, and graduate students may opt out by setting up ICS Gsuite delivery

Currently, only ICS mail that is delivered locally is scanned for spam, phishing, and malware. ICS Email systems rely on mail providers to scan for mail and malware upon delivery. This policy has resulted in some mail providers to black listing ICS mail servers.

In order to address this, beginning on 10/23/2020, messages received by ICS and forwarded to non-ICS mail services will be scanned. Messages identified as spam will be bounced back to sender. Messages containing super-spam or malware will not be delivered. Send email to helpdesk@ics.uci.edu if you have any questions.

All ICS faculty and staff have a UCI AD account setup (UCInetid@ad.uci.edu). This AD account comes with UCI Exchange email (UCInetid@exchange.uci.edu) and calendar services as well as access to Office 365. Meeting invitations are generally sent to this UCInetid@exchange.uci.edu inbox. We recommend that you verify that the email is being forwarded to where you normally read UCI emails by following the directions below. Otherwise, you may miss important messages and meeting announcements: Email Forwarding.

Please note that this Office 365 password may be different than your UCInetid one. To reset your Office 365/AD password, visit the Office 365 tab at Password Reset. For more information on email options, check Email Overview.

Several bare metal hosts are being made available to faculty and research groups to run self managed VM instances based on Vagrant and Virtual Box. Each instance will receive a static DHCP address and host name that will be accessible on or off campus. Each VM will be self managed and maintained by faculty or research groups to provide themselves with services that are not readily available through ICS Computing Support's managed offerings. VM Instances will be sharing processor time on several HP Proliant SL390s G7 blades (Dual 3.333 Ghz Intel 6-core processor and 96GB RAM) running CentOS 8 that were donated to the school last year.

If you are interested in a VM instance, please email helpdesk@ics.uci.edu and let us know the purpose of the instance as well as the period of time that the instance will be needed.

A new Openlab cluster consisting of 48 HP Proliant SL390s G7 blades (Dual 3.333 Ghz Intel 6-core processor and 96GB RAM) running CentOS 8 is available for fall quarter. The cluster has been designated openlab8. Please login and test out the new cluster, we anticipate migrating the older openlab hosts to CentOS 8 this coming quarter.

Users can open shells on this cluster by connecting to openlab8.ics.uci.edu from on campus, and from off campus using ssh keys.

Long running jobs should be submitted to the cluster via slurm. The parition name for this new cluster is openlab8.p. Slurm will replace SGE on all CentOS7, CentOS8 and Ubuntu hosts going forward. Please contact helpdesk@ics.uci.edu for help converting old SGE scripts to SLURM scripts.

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ICS Computing Support is excited to announce Jupyterub@ICS. The ICS hub turns any web browser into a Linux Terminal AND offers several web-based apps, including a console, Rstudio, XDesktop, and VSCode.

• Runing Ubuntu 20.04
• Based on
• Persistant Data*
  • User's ICS home directory mounted
  • Synchornized to openlab directories.
• IDE's
  • VSCode
  • Rstudio
• Notebooks
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • Julia
  • R
• CLI Tools
  • gcc/g++ and debugger
  • python3
  • R
  • Java
• GIT Integration tools
• X Server

Connect to the ICS Jupyterhub Portal

Follow the project here

All Adobe Creative Cloud apps are now available for free to enrolled UCI students, current employees, and their guests/sponsored accounts.

Visit this page for more information and this OIT guide for download and install directions.