AG DSN

Since yesterday evening there is a partial outage. Cause is a power outage at the internet exchange DE-CIX in Frankfurt am Main. Not only we are affected, but several providers in Germany.

According to the Twitter account of DE-CIX the problem will be resolved in 1 - 2 hours (2.30 am).

On the 8th of April from 12am to 8pm the performance of network and server resources might degrade.

Reason is the load test of some components, needed for future WiFi deployment.

On the 18th of April 2018 at 7pm a general assembly of the AG DSN will take place at our NOC on Räcknitzhöhe 35.

Topics of the meeting will be:

• Discharge and election of the executive board
• Passing a supplementary budget for 2018
• Changes to our constitution and regulations.

All details and the agenda can be found in the invitation (in German).

In preparation of our next general assembly we will meet this Thursday, 2018-03-22, at 7 pm at our NOC on Räcknitzhöhe 35 to discuss the first supplementary budget for 2018.

All members are welcome to participate and voice their opinions on the usage of our funds.

We're going to perform maintenance work in our dormitory Hochschulstraße on the 5th of March 2018 between 7:30 and 11:30 pm. During this period connectivity issues and outages are to be expected. We try to keep them as short as possible.

We are happy to announce a new service for our members, an HTTP cache. Once you enable the service in your usersuite, downloads from the supported services (currently only Steam) are redirected to an internal server, which is caching all downloaded data. Therefore multiple downloads of the same data only need to be fetched from the internet once.

The aim of this service is to reduce bandwidth usage on our uplink to the university, and to provide an improved experience, since our local network is much more capable.

We tested the service extensively, but please be aware that it will never move beyond a beta status, due to the inherent dependencies on the cached services. If you experince problems, we can only provide limited help, and you might have to disable it again.

More technical information, a list of the supported services and know problems can be found here.

In March our office hours will be:

• Borsbergstraße 34, 7th floor, on Mondays, 8-9pm
• Hochschulstraße 46, basement, on Mondays, 7-7.30pm
• Wundtstraße 5, ground floor, on Thursdays, 7-8pm

There will be no support hours on Easter Monday.

You can still contact us via the contact form.

The AG DSN wishes you a restful semester break.

From April 1st 2018 our membership contribution will be raised from 3.50€ per month to 5.00€ per month. The increase was discussed and enacted on the last general assembly, for which you can read the corresponding minutes here. The main reasons for the increase are our continuing efforts to bring infrastructure scale WLAN to all dormitories, increasing costs of operation due to inflation and necessary replacements of old hardware.

To avoid interruptions of service please update potential recurring payments and pay the monthly difference for all months you already paid in advance. You can see your current account balance in the user suite.

Addition 2018-03-10: In the third episode of the MultiCast we spoke about the reasons for the increase, among other things. Unfortunately the podcast is only available in German.

Today from 7:30pm onward we will swap out defective hardware of our network at Hochschulstraße 46. This will result in network outages, as always we will try to keep these at a minimum.

Due to the recent security issuese named "Meltdown" and "Spectre" we had to install last week multiple Updates to fix our systems. While updating we ran into a few issues wich lead to a few small network outages.

On Monday a service didn't restored properly after a system restart so the connectivity at Hochschulstraße was limited to those who connected their computer or router prior to the reboot.

In the evening a unexpected reboot of one of our servers in a critical moment lead to outage of Gret-Palucca-Straße and Neuberinstraße due to a routing issue.

Please excuse the inconvenience.

Begining with the 12/21 there will be no office hours until next year 01/03. The AG DSN takes a break for the holidays.

If there are emergencies you can still contact us via email. You find the contact form over here.

The AG DSN wishes you happy holidays and a happy new year. We look forward to the next successful year with you.