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Welcome to UGCS!

UGCS is the student-run computing facility of the California Institute of Technology. Historically, UGCS was an educational facility within the Computer Science Department; the name stands for UnderGraduate Computer Science. We are now independent of the CS department, but we continue to provide computing resources to the Institute's undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. For more information about our past, we have put together a brief history of UGCS.

Tip of the day for 2009-05-04 :

You can now use a semi-automated system to reset your password. See password resets for more information.

Tip of the Day Archive

Services

For our users, we provide:

For more information about our cluster and how to use its services, please see our user documentation

News

For older news, please go to the news archive.

June 21, 2009

The outer door has been fixed by "facilities".

June 20, 2009

The outer door to UGCS is jammed closed, making the lab inaccessible. If you are trapped inside, please send us an email or call security at 626-395-5000 (extension 5000 on campus). Otherwise, the lab will not be available for a few days. We will work with Facilities to take care of this as soon as we can.

May 5, 2009

UGCS is running its annual sysadmin search. If you are interested in being a UGCS syadmin, please take our sysadmin survey.

April 3, 2009

All user principles have been modified to allow Kerberos tickets to be requested for up to 365 days. Tickets may be renewed up to a total length of 3652 days. Unfortunately, Kerberos does not allow for an unexpiring ticket, analogous to an SSH keypair, but these should be close enough.

Febuary 18, 2009

UGCS now supports svn protocol for subversion source control hosting. We may add additional source control programs if users express interest (eg, git). For more information, see the page on Subversion.

Additionally, we are now running a PGP keyserver, for those of you who make use of such encryption. You can find it at [[1]], [[2]], and [[3]].

October 29, 2008

We will have a UGCS sysadmin meeting on Sunday, November 2, at 5pm in the UGCS lab. All are welcome to attend. See the UGCS Blog for more information.

July 28, 2008

We had an unplanned mail outage last night, and mail was not being delivered. We have fixed the problem and the mail queue should finish flushing with a few hours.

May 22, 2008

There will be scheduled downtime due to Caltech needing to bring down power for a few hours on Friday, May 23 from 4:00 AM - 6:00 AM. We will restore all systems as soon as possible after this event. Our UPS is kind of wimpy, sorry.

May 21, 2008

UGCS is back up after a several-hour power outage. All services should be back to normal- please let us know if you have any problems.

May 13, 2008

Due to a recently discovered vulnerability in OpenSSL, all UGCS host keys will be changing shortly. We will post a GPG-signed list of the new keys when we are done. It is a good idea to download this list and add it to your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

Update: Host keys for our login machines have been changed. A GPG-signed list of the key fingerprints is available at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/ssh-host-keys

May 13, 2008

Several UGCS, alumni, and IMSS users have been reporting increased phly phishing attempts (IE, trying to get you to send them your username and password and claiming to be the admins). Just a reminder that the UGCS sysadmins will never ask you for a password. If we want to confirm your identity we may send you a long string of letters and numbers and then ask you to send it back.

If you're more paranoid, all official email from sysadmins will be signed by that sender's GPG public key. If we forget, ask for a resent signed version before taking any action. You can find the UGCS Sysadmin key as well as our individual keys at the CA page.

May 11, 2008

The Mortals sub-cluster has been added. Enjoy!

March 2, 2008

Like Linux? Want to help make UGCS a better place? Think you've got what it takes to be a UGCS sysadmin? Well, then you're in luck. UGCS is conducting its annual sysadmin search. If you're interested, please take our Sysadmin Survey and submit it by the end of spring break (March 30).

February 13, 2008

We have automated the mailing list creation process. To create a mailing list, login to UGCS, and run the command create_mailinglist <LISTNAME>. Your list will be created within the minute. If you should run into any problems email me. alexr@ugcs.caltech.edu 18:15, 13 February 2008 (PST) Media:Example.ogg

Sysadmins

UGCS is administered by the UGCS sysadmins:

The sysadmins can be contacted at .