VirtualRDC News @ Cornell

All nodes and the web servers for the VirtualRDC are going to be unavailable on all day on Wednesday, November 7, 2007. [More »]

Software compiled and tested on the VirtualRDC has been installed on NSF01. In particular, R 2.5.1 plus sundry modules, OpenOffice 2.3 (latest), ImageMagick, as well as some ODBC and SQLite related components have been installed. Please let us know if you encounter any problems.

The Census Bureau released OnTheMap version 2.3 on September 30, 2007. The OTM data files for that release are now available on the VirtualRDC. An update to earlier files was also released; users who previously downloaded WAC and RAC files should download again. More details, including how to access the data files on the VirtualRDC are available at http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/onthemap/doc/.

As previously announced, R has been upgraded to 2.5.1 on VRDC6401. All libraries seem to load cleanly – let us know if you encounter any problems. This is the version that will also be ported to NSF01. Compiled, tested, and signed RPM packages have been made available for any interested person (running SLES9 on ia64…) at our download site: http://vrdc.ciser.cornell.edu/extras/RPMS/ia64/

We will be applying patches to all servers over the weekend. There will be scattered downtimes, generally brief. Please let us know if this is a problem for anybody.

We have updated the local copy of the QWI Public Use files to R2007Q3, which for most states contains data up to 2006:4. Access methods to the Cornell VirtualRDC’s copy of the QWI Public Use files are described at http://vrdc.ciser.cornell.edu/qwipu/ .

We have finally installed our Stata10 MP license on VRDC3203 (Quad-core, 8GB).

In preparation for the R upgrade on NSF01, we will be upgrading R on VRDC6401 over the weekend. Please let us know if this causes problems. R will be upgraded from 2.4.0 to 2.5.1.

We are applying security patches to repository.ciser.cornell.edu. The system will be unavailable for one hour late on Wednesday, 2007-10-10.

OpenOffice on all nodes has been upgraded to version 2.3. Consult http://www.openoffice.org for more details.