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.

And it’s very easy to try for yourself, simply visit the Hyperwords Company’s web site (using Firefox, of course) and download it for yourself.

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.

The truly terrific desktop desktop RSS reader for the Mac – NetNewsWire – along with it’s Windows-version cousin FeedGator have now become significantly less expensive to purchase. You can now download them for the low price of $0.00 – free.

NetNewsWire has long been my favorite reader on the Mac. Easy to use, configure, and customize, it easily outshines the free browser and web-based readers, and I never found another desktop client that I preferred more. The only thing stopping me from recommending it without reservation has been the $30 price tag. No longer!

Kudos to Ranchero Software for going the freeware route. Not Open Source, but the next best thing.

[disclaimer: this has been a completely unsolicited, unpaid-for, and gratuitous recommendation of a piece of software that I think is very cool. There are probably some others who do not share my opinion. Thayer School and Dartmouth remain entirely neutral on the subject, however]