The new Thayer School Dropbox is a way to quickly and easily get your file sent. Once you visit the site and authenticate, you just choose the file and upload it to the server. You’ll then be given a link to send to the recipient – or just have the Thayer School Dropbox do it for you. The recipient can then visit the link and download your file.

Right now, files can only be uploaded by Dartmouth community members (although anyone can download). Soon, we plan to add the capability for Dartmouth community members to generate a “slot” where an outside person could upload to them.

To use the Thayer School Dropbox, just visit https://dropbox.thayer.dartmouth.edu/ and follow the easy instructions. We hope you find this to be a useful service and welcome your comments on how it could be improved and expanded.

We plan doing a test trial by adding screens containing room schedules to M001, M101, and M201. We’ve already installed an early prototype screen on M101. The concept is to show exactly when a conference room is in use so that it can also be used for quick ad-hoc meetings and studying without scheduling conflicts.

We spent a lot of time researching options. The Steelcase RoomWizard is the most popular commercial product. However, the product is fairly closed, so if we wanted to add any additional content, such as announcements, photos, or weather, we’d be out of luck. The real show stopper was the price. Each room wizard would cost over $2000 not including installation. This price just doesn’t scale if the trial were to prove successful and we chose to outfit more rooms.

We’ve decided to try building our own. We investigated low power technologies like e-ink, but at this time, these also seem to be too expensive. We are now working on an embedded Linux touchscreen. We’ll cover additional details once we make some more progress.

Prototype display shows scheduled events for M101

We’ve added two displays at reception. One display is designed to provide feedback about Thayer School’s energy use. Currently it displays our instantaneous electricity usage in Cummings and MacLean, and also displays how much electricity our solar panels are producing. The plan is to make this data easier to understand, and add a couple other bits of data, such as weather from our weather station and printer usage.

The second reception displays contains upcoming events from the Thayer Events Calendar. It also loops through a slideshow of Thayer photos.

If these displays prove successful we’d like to permanently install larger flat panels on the wall.

Two displays at reception show energy consumption, upcoming events, and photos

And finally, in the Great Hall we are finishing up the installation of two large flat panel screens. These will be used during events which are held in the Great Hall. In the past we’ve used a digital projector in this space. However, due to all the natural light in the room, the projection screen is extremely washed out. These screens will be much easier to see in bright daylight.

When they aren’t being used for presentations or other events, we plan on using them for informational displays. Like the displays at reception, they’ll contain events, announcements, photos, weather, and more.

two new flat panel displays to be used for events

If you have ideas or feedback about any of these new displays, please let us know.

Our weekly Atrium Help Desk has proven to be an extremely popular event. The convenient location, the comfortable couch, the cookies. And, happily, you folks seem to enjoy it, too! (It must be because we share our cookies.)

But we are not content to let a good thing go un-modified.

After extensive polling and data analysis (and one of us having a conflict with Tuesdays this term) Your Friendly Computing Services Team has changed the time of our Atrium Help Desk hours. Please make note:

New Atrium Help Desk Hours: Mondays and Thursdays, 3 – 4pm

See you there!

The calendar contains many new features and improvements, while still mimicking the functionality of the old system. You will continue to get an email each Monday morning with the weeks upcoming events. However, there are now multiple other ways to stay in tune with events happening at Thayer School.

The new web address of the Thayer Events Calendar is: http://events.thayer.dartmouth.edu

Some of the Events Calendar Features

• Easily browse all events on the web – not just the current week’s upcoming events
• Submit events for any time in the future, not just the upcoming week
• Submit recurring events
• Get events delivered the way you want them – Web, Email, RSS, or iCalendar
• Download individual events to your personal calendar software (Oracle Calendar, Apple iCal, Google Calendar etc.)
• Search for events
• Lots, lots more

We’re still making changes and enhancements to the calendar and welcome your feedback. Please send comments to:
events [AT] thayer.dartmouth.edu

Be sure to check out our main Ubuntu page at:
http://ubuntu.thayer.dartmouth.edu/

Here, you’ll find instructions on how to set up your system to obtain updates from our local repositories.

You may also want to explore our new Linux @ Dartmouth Help Wiki. There’s not too much here yet, but we’ll be adding more linux support information in the coming weeks and months. If you have suggestions for additions or improvements to this wiki, please e-mail us at computing@thayer.dartmouth.edu.

For more information about Ubuntu, please see their web site: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Email and collaboration tools

Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.

Hard drive based back up server

We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To reflect our paranoia of making sure all your ThayerFS data is safe, we’re adding another layer of redundancy to our data back up plan. We just started setting up a new “online backup server”. It consists of fifteen 1 Terabyte hard drives which we’ll use to back up ThayerFS. This system will eventually be located off-site. We’ll continue to use our tape library which will be located in yet another off-site location.

Weather station and Solar Panel monitoring

We’re in the middle of a project to get a weather station installed on the roof of Murdough. We’ll be using the same system to monitor the output of the Solar Panels which are already installed on the roof. The plan is to make the data available on the web for those interested in local conditions and for research purposes.

Spanos lighting improvements

We have been working with our building manager and FO&M to add special lights to properly illuminate presenters. This should improve the quality of our lecture capture video and should reduce the harsh shadows the current lighting causes on the speaker’s face.

A/V system improvements, documentation, and repairs

Collaborating with Instrument Room personnel, we have been working for some time now to make our classroom and meeting room audio visual systems more user-friendly. This includes simplification of touch screen controls or even their replacement with pushbutton controls, enhanced documentation about how to use the systems, improved image quality in Spanos and C200, a combination white board/projector screen in M210, additional microphone options, improved/repaired audio, etc. Some of these improvements are finished, but we still have a long way to go on others.

New Intel compiler available

We purchased two floating licenses of Intel Fortran and C++ compilers for Linux. They are available on any of our Linux clients or compute servers. Also included with these licenses are the MKL and IPP libraries.

For more information about these new compilers and how to use them, please see our Linux Services page.

New lab computers

In the next few months, we plan to deploy new lab computers for the Linux lab in Cummings and to replace the ten oldest computers in MacLean 210.

Adobe Contribute rollout soonish

We’ve purchased licenses of Adobe Contribute, which will allow the Thayer Community to create and edit web pages in a simple WYSIWYG editor. The experience is similar to a word processor. If you are interested in using this software, please contact us.

Vista planning

While we’re content with Windows XP, Windows Vista is an inevitability as XP support is dropped by Microsoft. We’re going to start looking at the best way to image and deploy Vista on lab, desktop, and laptop computers.

Blade servers

We recently took delivery of a new blade chassis and some new blade servers. The chassis can accommodate up to 16 servers. The preliminary plan is to replace our aging babylon compute cluster with a couple of blades. This will reduce space, electricity, cooling, and administration time, while increasing the computing power over our current cluster. We’ll have several empty slots available for faculty with research projects that need extra computer power.

Condor High Throughput Computing

We’re investigating the use of Condor High Throughput Computing on our linux clusters. This would allow the Thayer community to submit compute jobs and have them distributed automatically to our compute clusters.

Currently, we are testing this on our limited-access sisyphus cluster, but hope to roll it out to an upgraded babylon cluster after the Spring term. Jobs run on either cluster will be able to use the other cluster’s CPUs if they are available.

Hardy Heron is coming…

The new version of Ubuntu, version 8.04 (hardy heron), is scheduled to be released at the end of April. This new release features many enhancements to the version we’re currently running on our linux clients, and is also the next of Ubuntu’s “long-term release” versions, which will get security updates for a longer period of time than their other versions.

We have been alpha (and now beta) testing this to ensure that any bugs related to our systems are reported and corrected prior to its official release. We plan to upgrade the Cummings 227 linux lab with the new version (and new computers, too!) after the Spring term. We will also be in touch with faculty and staff who have linux clients to schedule their upgrades.

ThayerCups server upgrade

We just upgraded the CUPS print server that handles print jobs from Mac and Linux clients. There should not be any change in the way you print from these platforms.  The new server is now easier to back up.

Application Virtualization

We are testing, “Application Virtualization”, a new technique for encapsulating applications to ease deployment to lab computers and client computers.

Atrium Help Desk continues

We continue to hold our “Atrium Help Desk” from 3:00-4:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come by the atrium if you have any computing-related questions.

In case you missed it, yesterday was the inaugural session of our latest attempt to scale the heights of accessible customer service: IT Atrium Help Desk!

Every Tuesday and Thursday from 3pm to 4pm one or more members of Your Friendly Computing Services Team will set up a satellite branch of our support office in the Glycofi Atrium. We hope this will provide easy, visible, and immediate access to computing assistance without having to visit our offices or send an email.

We hope that as you walk through on your way to the mailboxes, or between classes, or on the way to chat with Rose, you will notice our presence and be reminded of that burning IT question you’ve been meaning to ask us for the past month.

Plus, we have cookies.

Hope to see you there!

In order to perform this upgrade, ThayerFS will be taken offline and will be unavailable from 8:00am until 2:00pm on December 15th. Our hope is that the upgrade will be completed in less time than this, but it may take the full six hours. Once the system is back online, we will send e-mail to the community. Note that this outage will not effect e-mail, internet, or any other network services other than ThayerFS.

During this upgrade, we will also be moving the data in the Research share to different physical disks. During this move, Research will be accessible, but will be read-only. This move could take up to ten hours from the time that ThayerFS is back online, but may be done sooner. We will send separate e-mail regarding the status of this move.

If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail computing@thayer.dartmouth.edu.

Your Friendly Computing Services Team

Until now, computing services has set the monitors on our lab computers to go into power save mode, but the computers have remained idling, consuming around 70 Watts. Why? In Windows there is no off the shelf way to suspend a computer based on whether someone is logged in or not. We did not want machines going to sleep in the middle of the night just because the mouse had not been moved in an hour as that might interrupt a simulation running on the computer. To address this problem, we at computing services have written a script that puts the machine to sleep only when no one is logged on. This script is currently in testing on four computers in M210, and we hope to distribute it to our other lab computers in the near future. When a machine is sleeping, Its power light blinks, and the computer can be brought out of sleep mode by pressing the power button briefly. It takes about five seconds for the computer to wake up. If you have any questions of responses, please let us know!

Check out a few photos of the event here…