Davis-Etcheverry Computing Facility 
                     Fall 2005 Newsletter #1
                           09/09/2005

This issue of the DECF Newsletter is on the web at:
http://decf.berkeley.edu/news/fl05-01.html

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Table of Contents

1.  Important Policy Changes
    New print quota policy
    New disk quota upgrade fee
    Spam filter policy change

2.  Software and System Upgrades
    PGI Upgraded to 6.0    
    New Archipelagos linux cluster available end of Sept
    Looking for webmail beta testers

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1.  Important Policy Changes

New print quota fee change
    Beginning 7/1/05, the print quota fee will be amended.  Color
    pages will now cost 30 cents per copy.  Other charges remain the
    same.

New disk quota upgrade fee
    Beginning 7/1/05, disk quota upgrade fees will change.  Disk
    upgrades will cost $9 / 100MB / year instead of $14.  

Spam filter policy change
        In an effort to cut down the amount of spam coming into our
        server, DECF's spam delivery policy will change in the coming
        weeks.

        Currently, all emails with a "score" higher than 5.5 are marked
        as spam.  We would like to drop all emails with a spam score
        higher than 20.  It is estimated that about half of all spam
        emails will be dropped.  

        Beginning 9/15/05, we will be beta testing this new Spam
        filtering policy on one of our two spam scanning servers.  All
        emails that have a very high spam probability will be quarantine
        while we're in beta testing.  If all goes well, beginning
        10/15/05, the spam filter policy will be put in place.

        If you have any concerns with this change in policy, please email
        consult@newton.berkeley.edu.

2.  Software and System Upgrades

PGI Upgraded to 6.0
    PGI has been upgraded from 5.2 to 6.0 on the linux cluster.

New Archipelagos linux cluster available end of Sept
    In a few weeks, 15 new Linux machines will be put into
    production.  They are dual-CPU, Xeon 3.4GHz with 1GB of RAM.

    We encourage all DECF users who are running computations on the
    other clusters to migrate to this new cluster.  All Linux cluster
    use the same file server.  People running parallel computations
    can use machines from different clusters.  
    
    For more information about the cluster, please see:
    http://www.decf.berkeley.edu/help/info/archipelagos-linux.html

Looking for webmail beta testers
    We're now looking for beta testers for a new version of webmail,
    which will have a groupware feel to it.  Please send an email to
    consult@newton.berkeley.edu if you're interested in
    participating. 

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