Below is the text of an email update sent Nov-7-2006:

This is just a quick email to update folks who might be interested in knowing what I've been up to in the last while, and what things lay in store for POLAN in the near future.

-A small "Consolidation Server" for core infrastructure was partially deployed in early-September, which currently houses the intranet web site http://seahorse.phys.ocean.dal.ca -- providing updates, information etc. to folks affiliated with POLan. (Work is ongoing to migrate Mail and Public webserver function onto this system)

-Gigabit Ethernet installation for Core servers is underway and will be completed shortly. This will result in better performance NFS-disk-share access between the servers, and should also result in improved performance for the backup server.

-An NSERC RTI equipment grant was submitted for the Oct/25 deadline (many thanks to Dan, Keith, Alex and everyone else who contributed). If all goes well, we might get some grant $ to provide new CPU and Disk capacity to POLAN.

-The anchor replacement server, "Cargo" is being prepared for deployment and should be in "beta testing" next week. This server has a combined 4.8ghz of CPU power (compared to anchor's 6ghz) but will likely "feel" faster for interactive user sessions since the individual CPUs are ~4x faster. It also features ~2Tb of storage, a significant boost over the ~1 Tb of storage on anchor.

-"Ongoing User Support" continue at all times, topics range from printer setup, misc. hardware purchase (computers, hard drives, UPS Battery Backup, Memory Upgrades, etc), through to workstation installation / re-installation; new accounts setup; compiling and deploying software on core servers.

-MatLab server rollover in September: A new matlab license server configuration was deployed in early September, providing a more robust configuration (composed of 3 redundant servers) and hopefully thus providing improved uptime / availability to users. As is also typically the case, a new version of MatLab was released in Early September, which has been installed on core servers (Anchor, Jade, KT-4800, etc) and which is now used as the default for new installations on desktop/workstations. Anyone running an older version of MatLab should contact me to arrange having the "latest and greatest" installed on your system.

-There are a variety of other topics (I'm sure) which I'm forgetting to address here, but this email has been in my outbox as a draft for nearly a week now, so in the interest of actually sending this update I'll stop writing for now.

As always, if anyone has concerns or questions, please feel free to contact me anytime.

--Tim Chipman