Greetings programs,

On behalf of the Systems Committee I am pleased to bring you several updates regarding new servers and services.

New Servers ===========

We are announcing the general availability of the following servers:

neotame.csclub is a server with special configuration to act as a host for IRC clients. If you had an IRC session on taurine before taurine caught fire, we encourage you to use neotame for it now. neotame also listens on numerous low and high ports for your SSH convenience. For complete information, please check the machine list on the CSC Wiki.

carbonated-water.csclub is a 48-core general-purpose server with 128GB of RAM. sorbitol.csclub is a 40-core general-purpose server with 64GB of RAM. mannitol.csclub is a 40-core general-purpose server with 64GB of RAM.

We would like to thank the Math Endowment Fund for graciously funding several of these servers, and the Computer Science Computing Facility for providing hardware for one of these servers as well as two other new servers which have replaced several of our older internal services machines.

Upgrades to Cloud Services ==========================

Due to a series of poorly-timed hardware failures, our private cloud services have been degraded for a while. We would like to conduct an upgrade to the cloud servers that will involve a complete reinstall of several critical components and services. As such, current users of the CSC Beta Cloud are asked to migrate any services on cloud instances out of these VMs before Friday, November 8th. At this time the upgrade is scheduled to begin and after this date your instances will be unavailable. We expect to announce the availability of the upgraded cloud services in Winter 2020.

We hope you enjoy these new servers and as always, if you encounter any issues please contact the Systems Committee (syscom@csclub.uwaterloo.ca) for support.

mtrberzi CSC Systems Administrator