Thursday, October 2, 2014

Evil stuff disappearing and appearing at R1

We noticed some changes this last summer at our lovely R1. To document them, I took the following picture



The first thing you can notice is that the labels are gone!!! Do you remember about the "self-destruct / evil / chaos / abort" labels in the water fountain? Mysteriously, they disappeared one day without notice. I guess the CERN management finally noticed and thought that such thing might be a bad publicity for people coming to CERN, specially taking into account the big celebrations with all those VIPs coming here recently for the 60th anniversary of CERN.

Also, you might notice in that picture a new addition to the hardware of our dearest restaurant here. Look at the top right. Yes, that blue light. These are no normal light bulbs!!! These are fly terminators!!



And there is not only one on top of the water fountain but lots of them inside the restaurant in many places, even over the coffee machines.

Maikel and Mikaela have been complaining since very long time. They even complained about it officially in the paper survey they did in R1 not long ago. R1 usually gets full of flies during summer, specially in hot years, and it is not very appealing to see them flying and walking over the nice deserts when you are about to get one for coffee break... So it seems that finally R1 did something about it!!! Well, the flies did not really disappear, but it is true that we saw much less than normal this summer... well done!


Monday, August 4, 2014

The death of Scientific Linux CERN

Scientific Linux CERN is dead, long life CERN CentOs!!

We have all been suffering with it. Installing it, and specially updating it :D It was not easy at the beginning, but little by little we all learned to love it (or at least to deal with it).

Today, the CERN IT department announced that our dear Scientific Linux CERN (SLC) is dead. There it does not say it that clear, but in the email we got it is much more loud: there won't be any more SLC versions after version 6 and, instead, we will have a new guy with us, called CERN CentOs (CC), starting with version CC7.


A new penguin has come to town. And there was no place for 2 penguins here. There can be only one.

We just hope everything will be alright from now and we will not keep changing! And remember, if you got a hard time updating from SLC4 to SLC6, imagine what it is going to be to update now to CC7 !!! Lots of fun waiting ahead!