News

Changes to Lab 140 Webster (25th of September 2007)
Changes to the computers in lab 140 Webster, were performed in order to ensure that the computers in lab 140 perform as they were initially configured. If any problems are apparent they will be dealt with in the following weeks.

Computer configuration has been frozen to ensure reliability. If you encounter problems with the computer, restart it. If you continue having problems even after a restart then contact the servicedesk and report the problems.
The only area you are able to save data is the partition “Trashed Fri” on the desktop or an external storage device. Any data that is saved outside of this partition will not be there after the computer is restarted.
You need to be vigilant of where you save your data (this includes any software that you use – for instance, Garageband saves music files in the “music” folder, when you are finished using it you need to move it to “Trashed Fri” or to your external storage device.
All previous data that was located in the “Desktop, Documents, etc was relocated to the “Trashed Fri” partition.

We hope that these changes will ensure greater reliability.

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24/7 Internet Access in Mathews and Morven Brown Computer Labs (23rd May 2007)
The time restriction on internet access, in the Mathews and Morven Brown Buildings computer labs, has been removed. The internet is now accessible 24 hours/7 days a week in these computer labs.

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SPSS is now free for all UNSW staff (2nd May 2007)

SPSS is now free to download for all UNSW staff - Unipass access required. Please contact the Technical Resource Centre via the servicedesk for installation of this software. For more information on SPSS software distribution go to the ASCU website - http://www.acsu.unsw.edu.au/soft_dist/soft_spss.htm

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Potential issue for SPSS and INTEL MAC users (18th April 2007)

Taken from the SPSS website today: "SPSS does not support the use of any existing version of SPSS for Mac OS X on the new Intel®-based Mac hardware, including SPSS 11.x or 13.0. The use of the Rosetta emulation software interferes with the numerical calculations in SPSS. We therefore are unable to support any version of SPSS on Intel-based Macintosh machines. http://www.spss.com/spss_mac/system_req.htm

Please contact the Faculty IT manager if this issue will adversely effect your research or teaching.

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Production Equipment Borrowing (15th April 2007)

Changes to Guidelines
Due to the volume of students booking equipment consecutively for up to two weeks. The borrowing guildines have been changed to:

The Loan Period
The loan period is two days (48 hrs) or a weekend (72 hrs), once a week. This means you can borrow from:
Monday 10am until Wednesday 9.30am, Wednesday 10am until Friday 9.30am, Friday 10am until Monday 9.30am. There are a small number of kits, which can be borrowed for up to one week (see booking sheet). For one week hires, you may not borrow more than once per week or have consecutive bookings.

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Student Disk Quotas (April 2007)

What is my Quota?
Students have been allocated 200mb of disk space for their home folders. This space is intended for storing documents not music files or large image files.

What happens when my Quota is reached?
When 90% of this quota is used an e-mail is sent to the UNSW student e-mail account. When 100% of the quota is reached you will not be able to save anything to your home folder. There are some programs i.e. Safari and Final Cut Pro that save data to a preference file stored in your home folder when they open. If you cannot save to your home folder these programs will not open.

How to manage your Quota
There are several things you can do to make sure you don’t reach the quota limit;
Keep an eye on your Home folder size, delete files you don’t need and empty the trash.
To see your home folder size, open a finder window and click on the house icon in the left Sidebar.

The space available to you is written at the bottom of the window.

To see where the large files are; on the finder menu, click View > Show View Options this will put values in the Size column.

You may find you’ve deleted everything and emptied the trash but you still have no space. It could be you have a large number of cached files taking up space. To get rid of these;

Open QuickTime Player, go to QuickTime > QuickTime Preferences. A Preference pane will open, select the Browser Tab. Uncheck Save Movies in Cache and Click Empty Download Cache. Open Safari, go to Safari > Empty Cache.

If that doesn’t work
If you’ve followed these steps and can’t find where the space has gone please call the service desk on Tel. 9385 1333. You’ll need to leave your contact details so we can help troubleshoot your problem.

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Computer Lab Changes (February 2007)

Login procedures for the TRC computer labs have been changed over the summer break. You will no longer be able to login using a generic user account. Each student has been provided a unique user account based on their student number. Please read the information below to identify the format of your initial password. When changing your password please be aware that the new password must comply with the password policy which can be found here.

In the Name field type your student number (i.e. z3167983).

Your password is a combination of the following:

          The first letter of your surname in UPPERCASE;
          The second letter of your surname in lowercase;
          The last two numbers of your student ID;
          The day of the month you were born (in the format dd);
          The month you were born in (in the format mm).

If your name is Joe Bean, your student ID is z3167983 and you were born on the 2nd of June, your password will be Be830206

If you cannot logon:

Check that you have followed the above steps for your password
Try a different computer
If you enrolled after February 9th you will not have an account and you will need to request one by calling ext 51333.
If you still cannot logon call the service desk on ext 51333, make sure you have your student card handy and any error messages you received. Please leave a contact number so we can call you to resolve your problem.

These changes will affect the following labs:
Morven Brown LG47 and LG49
Mathews 210 and 211
Robert Webster 136, 136C and 254

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Virus Alert (February 2007)

ITS has received reports that there are malicious emails currently in circulation that purport to be news broadcasts with subject lines such as

"Current Australia's Prime Minister survived a hear attack"
"The life of the Prime Minister is in grave danger"
"Prime Minister survived a heard attack"

If you receive such emails, or emails of a similarly dubious nature, do not open them but instead delete them from your Inbox.

Always regard emails you did not request as suspicious. Do not click on links or open the attachments of such emails.

If you require more information on this topic, please contact the IT Service Desk on (02) 9385 1333 or email servicedesk@unsw.edu.au

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