Mike VanHorn's News Feed

New Stuff for Fall 2010

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:54:07 -0400

Okay, it's been forever since I updated this, but I've finally gotten time. Here's what's new for Fall 2010:

- The wilbur machines in 141 have a new build. Fedora 7 has been replaced with CentOS 5.5 (closer to actual Red Hat).

- Abaqus is now up to 6.10

- Ansys/Fluent/CFX are now up to 12.1

- The 310 Oleman and 243 Russ (Caccioppo) labs have been updated with new PCs.

** Coming for Winter 2011: New PCs for the 152 Labs! **

Firefox 3.6 on gandalf and VLSI machines in 333

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:38:02 +0000

Firefox 3.6 is now installed on gandalf and the VLSI workstations in 333. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

New Mathematica license file in place

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:03:04 -0400

The new Mathematica license is now in place. Please let me know if something doesn't work.

New Cadence license file in place

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:05:21 -0400

I have just finished putting the new Cadence license file in place. If something doesn't work, please let me know.

Thanks!

New ANSYS on gandalf and wilburs

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:34:16 -0400

As of today, the default ANSYS is the new version 12. Similar to previous versions, the command is launcher120.

New processors for thor

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:25:52 -0400

As of this morning, thor has 4 new processors and 2GB of new RAM. A few weeks ago, one of the processor/RAM units died; this meant that we lost four 400MHz R12000 processors and 2GB of RAM. I took the RAM from the dead C-brick and put it in the remaining one, and thus we had four 600MHz R14000s and 4GB of RAM. This morning we installed a replacement C-brick, so that we now have the four 600MHz processors and four 500MHz processors and 6GB of RAM total (4 on the old brick, 2 on the new one).

NAG Fortran on Linux in 141

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:26:09 -0400

The NAG Fortran compiler is now installed on the Linux side of the wilbur workstations in 141; man nagfor. There is no gui (FortranBuilder) as there is under Windows.

Gandalf was down over this past weekend

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:55:05 -0400

Gandalf was effectively down this weekend, apparently from sometime Saturday night until just after 7:00am this morning (Monday, 27 Apr 2009) when Doug did a hard reboot. It was still running, but it was so slow that it was unresponsive. It's back up now, and seems to be fine. We will be monitoring it.

Old Tecplot License Server Shut Off

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:53:13 -0400

If you are using the old Tecplot 360 software, it will probably not work now, as I have shut off the license server for it, per the company. I'm pretty sure I have been able to upgrade everyone to the newer version, Tecplot 360-2008, but if I missed you, please let me know and I will get you the installer.

Abaqus using X-Win32 as the X server

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:25:19 -0400

These directions are specifically for using X-Win32 with SSH Secure Shell on the PCs in 125 Russ. However, the principle is the same no matter where you are.

In order to display Abaqus using X-Win32, please use the following procedure:

1) Before you start X-Win32, go to Start, Programs, X-Win32 X.X, and run
X-Config. Go to the Window tab, and check the "Single Window" radio button,
and make sure that "Standard" is selected under "Single Options". Click
OK to save this change.

2) Start X-Win32. You should get a large grey window that fills pretty much
the whole screen.

3) Start SSH Secure Shell and login to gandalf.

4) On gandalf, run "gnome-wm &" (without the quotes). This starts a
window manager (in the background), which is needed now that X-Win32 is
in Single Window mode. You might get an error about there being no
session manager; you can safely ignore this.

5) Finally, run abaqus-cae.

6) To safely quit all of this, first exit from Abaqus (File, Exit), then
right-click on the X-Win32 icon in the system tray, and select "Exit"
from the pop-up menu. Then you can safely logout of gandalf and close
the SSH Secure Shell window.

Apache upgraded on www

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:51:45 -0400

I just finished upgrading the Apache http server to version 2.2.9 (from 2.2.8) on the web server. There should not be any problems, but please let me know if there are. Thanks!

New F-Prot antivirus software

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:27:09 -0400

I just got done updating the F-Prot antivirus software on the web server. This updates itself and does a scan every night. This should effect any users per se, but I wanted to let everyone know that we are using the latest antivirus software.

New Thunderbird

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:54:19 -0400

Sheila installed the new version of Thunderbird (2.0.0.14) on gandalf while I was on vacation (last week). It seems to run fine on gandalf and on her workstation, so it should be good everywhere. If not, let one of us know.

Recent changes on UNIX systems

michael.vanhorn@wright.edu (Mike VanHorn) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:08:09 -0400

Earlier this week we made two changes to the CECS UNIX systems that may be significant for some users, although no one has reported any issues so far.

First, the license server for Ansys has been moved from thor to gandalf. This will most likely affect PC users of Ansys; if you start Ansys and get a license error, this is why. Contact Doug, Sheila, or myself for more info.

Secondly, I installed the latest version of Firefox (2.0.0.14) on gandalf. This shouldn't cause any major problems for any of the Solaris systems (most of which get /usr/local/ from gandalf), but in setting this up we discovered that Acrobat Reader (acroread) was broken on gandalf. Turns out Acrobat Reader 8 won't run on our Solaris 9 machines, of which gandalf is one. So, I had to install Acobat Reader 7 on gandalf, and the command is acroread7.