You might or might not like the new Oce multifunctional printers the Informatikdienst HSLU installed everywhere on the campus. Many cool features like scanning a file and get it sent to you directly as a pdf via email are cool functions. Not so cool (for our beloved trees) is that everytime you print a page (or more than one) a banner page appears showing your login/date/time etc.

You can (and should) turn this off. In UNIX it was under printer settings and then printer options “Banner page” -> “Off”. In the ppd file (/etc/cups/ppd/printername.ppd) this would be:

*DefaultJCLOCBannerPage: No

I’m quite sure you can turn this of in Windows and MAC OS quiete similar. It would be even more helpful if IT Services sets the standard driver configuration not to print the banner page. For our environment. And for our trees

UPDATE: I just got an email from Christoph Stutz workig for IT Services. He told me that unfortunately there’s no standard setting  for removing the banner page. But he also pointed out how the problem is solved by using the right driver. I felt free to print his text here and didn’t translate it into english:

zu den "banner-pages":
windows-mässig auf unserem print-server und auf dem drucker selber sind alle
"banner-prints" deaktiviert.

der linux-treiber scheint standardmässig mit "banner-print" "enable"
ausgestattet zu sein..das kann ich aber selber auch nicht steuern...das
müssen linux-anwender selber richtig konfigurieren..wie sie das in ihrem
blog schon sehr gut beschrieben haben.

leider gibt kein generelles setting auf dem drucker, der das
"banner-drucken" von allen OS verhindert. verwendet man aber den richtigen
treiber oder konfiguriert ihn richtig, kommen auch keine banner raus.
dabei ist es aber wichtig dass Mac-user den druckertreiber von unserer
webseite: http://hotline.hslu und linux-user von dieser website:

http://www.konicaminolta.eu/business-solutions/support/copier-print-systems.

html beziehen und installieren - bei diesen sollte das "default" ohne
banner-druck sein..bei den Mac's mit sicherheit.. bei linux "ohne gewähr". 

ich hoffe dass ich mit diesem mail einen kleinen oekologischen beitrag
leisten konnte.

Thank you Christoph. And I aswell hope that we could now save some trees

Today we finally took down the old iServer. With a little smile on our face and a little teardrop in our eyes, we take farewell from our good old friend.

root@iserver / # shutdown -h now “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”

Broadcast message from root (pts/1) (Thu Oct  9 17:02:00 2008):

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The system is going down for system halt NOW!

We will always keep you in good memory.

PS: If anybody had data on the iServer which he didn’t backup so far, I have a USB drive with all the data on it.

Hello

I’m proud to announce, that it is now possible to create your public_html to be displayed on the web.
It’s really easy to get it work:
Just create a directory named public_html in your home directory on enterpriselab. There you can put your web page (html, php possible). Your page should now be accessible through:

http://user.enterpriselab.ch/~<yourusername>

If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me.

Hi folks!

There’s now the possibility to activate a Spam Plugin for your blog(s) if you encounter problems with comment spam.
Please see our wiki for more information.

At Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, we built a team of students providing services for other students on Solaris OS.

A need of urgent action

In the past, some students I was leading, provided different services like svn, wiki, forum, webserver, etc. for other students on a single server
called the iServer. As this server was not firewalled by our IT Service and not officially supported by them, we had to take urgent action as
the IT Services told us that they will take down the server in this summer because it didn’t fit their SLA and IT rules.
So we had to hurry building a new team of fresh students (most of the students in the old team are leaving this summer).

Why not using existent infrastructure?

We came up with the idea, that our Enterprise Lab (www.enterpriselab.ch) could be the best place to provide such services. With the agreement
of the labs head Bruno Joho, we could easily keep the services up. Of course he agreed, as this finally could be a big improvement on the
visibility of our lab. So we decided to migrate all the services to the Enterprise Lab.

That is hours of work! Who can the whole task until summer?

As the idea was up we started to think on who could do all the work. And we came to the great idea: Why not let do the students the work?
It’s a win-win situation for both: the students and the Enterprise Lab staff. Students can improve their knowledge on Solaris and on how
to keep a service up and running. So we decided, the whole task from planning, over migrating to actually providing the service should be
done by individual students who are interested in such topics. As we couldn’t expect the students having much knowledge of Solaris and
the infrastructure of our lab, we decided to assign mentors to each service. A mentor is a person which has knowledge on Solaris and on a specific
Service. So the students could ask them if they run into problems.

Whats next?

Finally, after 3 weeks of recruitment of new members we had built a team with 20 students. Now we started to migrate the following services which
can be used by students, staff and professors:

- a forum with user authentication over ldap (in the past we had to set up each user separately) – forum.enterpriselab.ch
- a blog space with ldap auth (blog.enterpriselab.ch)
- a place for subversion repositories
- a place for public/or private wikis (students mostly use this for learning for their finals)
- a web space (public_html of users home will be available to the world)
- a bug tracking system (where students can maintain their projects)
- a database server (where students, staff, etc. can play with databases, mainly mysql)
- and maybe much more services to come

The goal is, that we can start providing those services this summer. Some services are already up and running.
The second goal is to let the students improve their knowledge in Solaris and other Sun technology as their services
all run in our lab. So they have to deal with zfs, zones, ldap, apache, php, mailman, wordpress, dokuwiki, bugtrak, svn, mysql,
ssh, … and much much more.

This way I hope we can build a big Solaris community on our campus.

Kind regards from Switzerland

Yesterday I started officially with my job as SUN Campus Ambassador at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. I’m very glad to have this position and will do the best. My main responsibilities with this job are:

– Lead the Sun open source developer community on my campus
- Run Sun Technology demo sessions on my campus
- Promote Sun training events on my campus
- Promote Sun’s open source platforms and development tools to professors and researchers

I’m working part-time about 5 hours a week. I’m very excited to hold my first tech demo before the end of this year. More information about this will follow. Also I ask all the students, professors and researchers here on the campus to contact me if they  have any questions to SUN related products and technologies. At this point I want to thank SUN for this great opportunity and my employer, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, for giving me the chance to combine my studies, my employment at Enterprise Lab and my position as SUN Campus Ambassador. As soon as I have my SUN blog working, I will also post a link here.

Today morning the complete staff at our campus received an email warning of a virus. The mail tells you to forward the information to all your colleagues and relatives. Please, please, please, to all who receive such messages: Check the message first if its a hoax before forwarding it to thousands of people. A good link for hoaxes is the hoax index from TU Berlin.