- csc-general - CSC Mailman

Mandatory public-key authentication on all CSC machines
by Computer Science Club 13 Sep '21

13 Sep '21

Hello CSC, Due to the increasing security threats leveraging passwords, the University of Waterloo has moved to require that all SSH Servers exposed to the public Internet must enforce strong authentication by November 1st, 2021. To comply with this requirement, we will be disabling password authentication for SSH on all CSC general-use machines on October 15th, 2021. We suggest that you add your SSH public key to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if you have not done so already. We will still enable password authentication on the campus network. This means that you may still login via SSH with your password if you are physically on campus, are using a student CS machine as a jump host, or are using the campus VPN. However, we still suggest setting up public key auth anyways for non-campus access. If you have any questions or concerns, please email the Systems Committee at syscom(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. -- Max Erenberg Systems Administrator Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo

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Alt Tab Speaker Applications (Due July 15) + Afterhours: Burnout (July 17) + Machine Downtime (July 17)
by Computer Science Club 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

Hello programs, Here are a few announcements for July. Join CSC for Alt-Tab, an event that consists of 10-15 minute talks by students on some interesting topics in the field of tech! Some topics that students have delivered talks on include virtual reality, pathfinding, web development, and competitive programming. The event will be hosted virtually at the end of July! Currently, we are looking for speakers for the event who are passionate about tech and want to gain some public-speaking experience. We would love to hear from everyone! Apply at https://bit.ly/csc-alt-tab-speaker-application ! Alternatively, you can also email us at exec(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca with an outline of your topic. Application Deadline: Thursday, July 15th at 11:59pm ET. ------ CSC's next Afterhours is here! Afterhours is a series where we get the opportunity to dive into uncomfortable topics and share our experiences, as well as tips and tricks on how to overcome these problems. It's unfortunately common to feel burnt out and exhausted, especially at this point in the term. This Afterhours will be a discussion about recognizing burnout, recovering from burnout, and preventing it from occurring. Speakers will share their personal stories, and the conversation will be open for all participants to discuss and share their own experiences. Event Date: Saturday July 17th, 8:00- 9:00pm ET via Zoom Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83131978922?pwd=Tm1NLzgraGZ2U1VCQVpDSFZxbGpSdz09 ------ There will be a planned power outage in MC Saturday, July 17 from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm. Most CSC services will be unavailable during this time. CSC machines will be powered off one hour before the outage begins, at 6:00 am. 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 -- Neil Parikh Treasurer, UWaterloo CSC

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Spring 2021 Fees waived + Election Results + Titus Winters Tech Talk (June 10th) + Speed Friending (June 15th)
by Computer Science Club 10 Jun '21

10 Jun '21

Hello all, Hope you're all having a great summer so far. A few updates for the month of June: MathSoc has decided to waive club fees for the Spring 2021 term. If you are a current CSC member who has already paid for Spring 2021 membership, your membership has been extended by one term. If you are a current CSC member whose membership is expired for the Spring 2021 term, you can email syscom(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca to have your membership renewed for the term at no cost. ------- Spring 2021 elections have concluded. Here are your executives for the term: - President: Kallen Tu (k4tu) - VP: Gordon Le (g2le) - AVP: Ravindu Angammana (rbangamm) - Treasurer: Neil Parikh (n3parikh) - Sysadmin: Max Erenberg (merenber) The unfilled positions this term are Office Manager, Librarian and IMAPD. ------- Become inspired in an upcoming talk by Titus Winters on June 10th from 7-8pm ET, who will share how good team culture can positively impact code! Titus Winters is a senior staff software engineer at Google, the chair of the global subcommittee for the design of the C++ standard library, a teacher and an author. Over the years, Titus has started several Google projects that are believed to be in the top 10 largest refactorings in human history. This unique scale and perspective has informed his thinking on the care and feeding of software systems. In this tech talk, Titus will discuss the roles of individual contributors, team leads, and managers in fostering a good culture, and show how this has a positive impact on project outcomes. Titus's talk will hit many teamwork and leadership themes of the "Software Engineering at Google" book, and the habits that have made his teams successful. Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/97312996497?pwd=Vnl5ZXNFTEJHQkRqMndnR3N0VjlJZz09 Registration (optional): http://bit.ly/csc-sesoc-google-tech-talk-signups ------- We know a virtual Spring term is making meeting new friends even harder, but we are happy to announce that our Speed-Friending event is back! Come hop on a Zoom call with us to get a chance to connect with others in our community. Like last term's event, you will be able to meet others in groups of 3 or 4, with around 10 minutes to talk. An optional prompt will act as an icebreaker, but feel free to discuss anything you want! Remember to connect with the people in your groups if you'd like to stay in contact afterwards! Registration is optional; we'll just be sending you a reminder on the day of, as well as a calendar invite. Event Date: Tuesday, June 15th 2021, 8-9pm EST Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/94998577861?pwd=REFJK0FUZXUzWUdlQVRjQVo4WGtJZz09 Sign up at http://bit.ly/uwcsc-speed-friending-signups! Alternatively, you can also email us at exec(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. -- Neil Parikh Treasurer, UWaterloo CSC

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Migration from Freenode to libera.chat
by Computer Science Club 26 May '21

26 May '21

Hello CSC, Due to recent events involving the takeover of Freenode and the departure of most of its staff, we have decided to migrate the #csc channel on Freenode to libera.chat (https://libera.chat/) We are currently using Matterbridge to bridge messages between the two IRC networks, but this is only a temporary measure to ease the transition. If you are in the #csc channel on Freenode, please migrate to the #csc channel on libera.chat at your earliest convenience. If you have any questions, please email syscom(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. -- Max Erenberg System Administrator Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo

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[CSC]Spring 2021 Fees + Elections + Power outage + Events
by Computer Science Club 14 May '21

14 May '21

Hello all, Welcome to the Spring term! Here are a few updates: There will be a planned power outage in MC tomorrow (Saturday, May 15) from 7:00 am to 11:00 am. Most CSC services will be unavailable during this time. CSC machines will be powered off one hour before the outage begins, at 6:00 am. --------------- Mathsoc has currently not decided on whether club fees will be collected for the Spring 2021 term. If you are a current CSC member whose account was active last term, you will retain access to CSC systems for all of May. We will send another email once MathSoc has made a decision. --------------- Due to the closure of campus this term, the Computer Science Club will be holding elections for Spring 2021 virtually. The president, vice-president, treasurer and assistant vice-president (formerly secretary) will be elected and the sysadmin will be appointed. The librarian and office manager will not be appointed, since the office will be closed for the Spring term. If you'd like to run for any of these positions, please email cro(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. Nominations will close on Friday, May 21 2021 at Noon EDT. --------------- Joining forces with Tech+, UW Data Science Club, and UW PM, we're hosting live resume critiques! The session will be held on Discord; you must sign up at http://bit.ly/S21-resume-critique to gain access to the critiques. Deadline to signup is Friday, May 14th at 11:59pm EDT. --------------- Kick off your Spring term with CSC! Come join us on Discord (https://discord.gg/pHfYBCg) on May 17th at 8 PM to learn more about what we'll be up to this term and how you can participate! Afterwards, stick around for a relaxing and fun game night. See you there! -- Max Erenberg System Administrator Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo

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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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Syscom Recruitment
by Computer Science Club 10 Feb '21

10 Feb '21

Hello CSC, The Systems Committee (syscom) is currently recruiting new members for W2021 and beyond. What is syscom? Syscom is the committee responsible for the operation, maintenance and upgraing of all CSC equipment. Here's a non-exhaustive list of some of the services we provide: * Web hosting * Email hosting * Git hosting * Open source software mirroring * CSC machine access * Roundcube (web UI for email) * The Lounge (web UI for IRC) * ZNC (IRC bouncer) * Mattermost To join syscom, you should have at least some basic familiarity with the command line and GNU/Linux. If you are interested in joining syscom, please send an email to merenber(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca with the following information: * CSC username * program and year of study * any relevant experience you have with GNU/Linux Please note that you are not making any commitment to the Systems Committee by expressing your interest; you're under no obligation to join in the future if you decide that it's not right for you. Looking forward to hearing from you! Max Erenberg CSC Systems Adminstrator

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Winter 2021 Club Fees will not be collected + Election Results
by Computer Science Club 28 Jan '21

28 Jan '21

Hello CSC, MathSoc has decided not collect fees for the Winter 2021 term. Due to this: * If have already paid for Winter 2021 membership, your membership will be extended by one term. * If your membership is expired for the Winter 2021 term, you can email exec at csclub.uwaterloo.ca to have your membership renewed for the term at no cost. Winter 2021 elections have also concluded. Here are your executives for the term. - President: Kallen Tu (k4tu) - VP: Gordon Le (g2le) - AVP: Nakul Vijhani (nvijhani) - Treasurer: Neil Parikh (n3parikh) - Sysadmin: Max Erenberg (merenber) -- Neil Parikh CRO, UWaterloo CSC

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