March 2021 - csc-general

Changes to SpamAssassin
by Computer Science Club 28 Mar '21

28 Mar '21

Hello CSC, Some time this week, we will be making changes to our SpamAssassin configs to use a site-wide Bayesian learner instead of per-user. Given that the vast majority of our spam is directed towards our mailing lists rather than individual club members, I think this makes the most sense for us. We will also be increasing the scores for the Bayes tests to keep spam out of our inboxes more aggressively. Unfortunately, this means that there will likely be some false positives. I will try to adjust the Bayes test scores to keep this rate low. Alternatively, you can set your own custom scores in ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs. This means that all of the bayes* files in everyone's ~/.spamassassin directories are now useless. If these files are taking up a lot of space, it would probably be a good idea to delete them. As a final reminder, SpamAssassin only adds headers to emails which it flags as spam - it does not actually delete or move them. If you wish to invoke some custom action on these flagged messages, you can use a custom procmailrc file, as outlined in our wiki: https://wiki.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/Mail#Spamfiltering If you have any concerns or suggestions, please send a message to syscom(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. -- Max Erenberg Systems Administrator | Computer Science Club University of Waterloo

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Planned Outage on Saturday, Mar. 20
by Computer Science Club 18 Mar '21

18 Mar '21

Hello CSC, Computer Science Club systems and services will be unavailable on Saturday, Mar. 20 due to a planned power outage in the Mathematics and Computer Building (MC) from 7am to 5pm. The CSC will begin shutting down machines at 6am in preparation of the outage. This outage will impact: - Web hosting (all personal and club websites) - Email (@csclub.uwaterloo.ca email addresses) - General-use machines - The Lounge - ZNC - BigBlueButton - Mattermost We are hoping to keep mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca available for the duration of the outage using a backup mirror. Please prepare for the outage by: - Ensuring all running processes have their state saved (configuration, data, etc.) - Any important files are backed up off-site from the CSC If you have any questions/concerns, please email the Systems Committee at syscom at csclub.uwaterloo.ca -- Max Erenberg Systems Administrator | Computer Science Club University of Waterloo

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Alt-Tab speaker applications and BigBlueButton
by Computer Science Club 07 Mar '21

07 Mar '21

Hi CSC, We have two announcements to make in this email. 1. *Alt-Tab speaker applications now open* Join Computer Science Club for Alt-Tab, a lightning tech talk series presented by students. Alt-Tab consists of 10 to 15-minute talks about anything related to tech. We are currently looking for speakers! If you're passionate about a technical topic and interested in public speaking, apply by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/JpEsGTZK9WRbFUw46. Alternatively, you can also email us at exec(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca to introduce yourself, as well as an outline of your proposed 10-15 minute talk. Applications are due on Friday, March 12th 11:59pm EST. Hope to see you there! 2. *BigBlueButton now available* CSC now hosts its own instance of BigBlueButton at https://bbb.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, freely available for all members. BigBlueButton is a free and open source video conferencing platform. It runs directly in the browser, and includes many useful features such as multi-user whiteboards, embedded videos, and interactive polls. To get the most out of BBB, there are some tutorial videos you can watch here: https://bigbluebutton.org/html5 Happy video calling! -- Max Erenberg Systems Committee | Computer Science Club

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