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News from the staff team

We post major announcements related to the OCF here. For downtime information or unscheduled events, however, you may want to follow our status blog which will have the latest info even if the site is down.

  • 1 min read

Decal applications open!

Calling all Linux enthusiasts and newcomers: join the OCF's Linux Sysadmin Decal! We cover everything you need, from shell scripting to containerization, in order for you to run your very own Linux server — and learn the ropes of what the world's computing and networking infrastructure is built on.

To apply, fill out Lab 0 by the deadline of Sept 5th 11:59pm. For more information, come to our next infosession on Sept 3rd at 7pm in the lab! We hope to see you in the lab soon ^-^

  • 4 min read

Student Organization Subdomain Moratorium

Campus wants to rename your website and email addresses

TL;DR: The university is revoking all existing *.berkeley.edu domains for student organizations, and mandating migration to *.studentorg.berkeley.edu. All new allocations are put on hold until this occurs and will subsequently also be provisioned as *.studentorg.berkeley.edu.

If you'd like to voice your feelings on this subject, please direct your comments to:

If you have questions for the OCF (or would like to CC us on communication with the two aforementioned university representatives), please contact: subdomains@ocf.berkeley.edu

Final Statement

The Open Computing Facility (OCF) is deeply dissapointed in the proclamation made by the UC Berkeley Department of Marketing and Digital Communications today. It displays a concerning lack of attention, care, and respect for the student body from administrators who are purportedly here for the benefit of the students. We also condemn the use of the OCF name in this announcement. The OCF's (and by extension the student body's) concerns were not "carefully considered", instead they were wholly ignored. Furthermore, the responsibility of migrating the websites of hundreds of student groups has now been thrust onto the all-volunteer staff of the OCF - seemingly without clear guidance or instruction from those making this decision. We appreciate the vast amounts of support from the ASUC and many other student organizations during this process and are grateful to have formed new partnerships with our users through this experience. Thank you.

Read the university's announcement here:
https://brand.berkeley.edu/news/top-level-sub-domain-name-changes-student-organizations

General Overview

Since 1998, the Open Computing Facility has hosted websites for UC Berkeley students, faculty, and staff. Currently we host websites for 633 student organizations. As an integral part of the UC Berkeley community, student groups until recently were allowed to register a subdomain of berkeley.edu for these websites (i.e. group.berkeley.edu). Sites must be pre-approved by both the OCF team and the university hostmaster (who allocates the subdomains). The OCF constantly monitors these sites for violations of university policy after their release, and resolves each issue in a timely manner.

Recently, the UC Berkeley Department of Marketing and Digital Communications has decided that no registered student organizations shall be allowed to have a berkeley.edu subdomain. Their main concerns are (1) that student websites are not accessible to the standard required by the WCAG 2.0 (AA) Success Criteria and (2) that this then places liability on the university for the use of its brand image by student groups. Notably, however, student groups are exempt from the WCAG 2.0 (AA) Success Criteria.

Despite several attempts to explain the importance of a berkeley.edu subdomain and massive impacts of removing this service (as well as providing suggestions for compromises), the marketing department has not changed their plans. As of today, this is the official policy of UC Berkeley - student groups may not hold berkeley.edu domains. All existing subdomains must be changed. As far as we are aware, there will be no exceptions to this rule.

The OCF recently conducted a survey of all hosted student organizations. Almost 90% of these groups responded that they oppose the change and nearly all feel it is a negative step for the university.

Mainly, this change will break all links pointing to all student sites. Every flyer, poster, document, and more produced over the last 20 years will have to be reprinted at the expense of the student group. Each and every industry contact at every student organization will have to be told to change their contact - otherwise the contact will be lost forever.

Groups may then favor a shorter .org or .com domain. Since we do not provide these domains, we cannot regulate them and ensure they comply with campus technical, legal, and marketing requirements. Not to mention the price that groups would have to pay to purchase and continually renew an external domain.

The OCF, in response to this, is committed to opposing the change on behalf of the student body. An attempt like this was made in 2013, but was successfully repealed by the OCF with the support of students, staff, and faculty. Students are what makes UC Berkeley a world-class educational institution, and should be afforded the technical tools required to maintain that reputation. Questions, comments, or support should be directed to subdomains@ocf.berkeley.edu.

Historical Timeline

Below is a list of the major developments that have occurred since we were made aware of this issue. Between each of these landmarks, the OCF has been meeting with relevant entities to attempt to resolve this issue.

  • 06/24/2022: The university requires all new *.berkeley.edu domains requested by student groups to submit responses to new screening questions
  • 09/29/2022: The first domain is rejected by the university
  • 11/03/2022: After a long chain of communication with various campus entites, the OCF makes contact with the Department of Marketing and Digital Communications
  • 11/15/2022: The Daily Cal reports on the "surprising and frustrating" subdomain changes
  • 11/12/2022: OCF sends out a survey to student organizations that have a *.berkeley.edu domain to gather feedback on the change
  • 03/01/2023: OCF & ASUC Office of the CTO launch an ASUC Senate resolution opposing the change publicly
  • 03/15/2023: The ASUC senate resolution SR 22/23-041 passes with a resounding majority and is co-signed by 148 organizations
  • 05/26/2023: After ignoring the senate resolution and further input from the OCF, the university publishes a document mandating all student organizations migrate to *.studentorg.berkeley.edu domains

The Open Facility for Computing is an all-volunteer, student-run organization. It was founded in 1989 to serve the interests of the UC Berkeley campus community.

Questions or comments about this change? Please reach out to subdomains@ocf.berkeley.edu.

  • 1 min read

The OCF is hiring!

We are looking to hire students to be OCF Operations staff for the 2019 academic year and onward! This includes two paid positions, Operations Assistant and Operations Manager, neither of which require any technical experience. These are very important roles, and without dedicated and passionate students to fill them, the OCF will not be able to stay open next semester.

Operations Assistants

Operations Assistants will have the following responsibilities:

  • Staffing the front desk
    • Maintaining lab security
    • Assisting OCF members with using the lab
    • Carrying out regular lab maintenance
  • Working on projects that benefit the OCF
    • Marketing and outreach
    • Collecting feedback on OCF services
    • Organizing events taking place in the lab
    • Researching and applying for additional sources of funding for the OCF
  • Attending regular meetings with the Operations Manager and the other Operations Assistants
The salary for this position is $15 per hour.

Operations Manager

The Operations Manager has the same basic responsibilities as an Operations Assistant, but will also be responsible for managing OAs, their shifts and projects, and scheduling and leading meetings with OAs and OCF Volunteer staff. The OM position places a greater emphasis on managerial duties than time spent staffing the front desk. The salary for this position is $17 per hour.

Application

Applications close on Sunday, November 4th at 11:59 PM. Apply here!

  • 2 min read

The OCF is hiring!

Update April 8, 2017: The application period is over and we are no longer accepting applicants. Thank you so much to everyone who applied!

The OCF is making a big transition to having a completely self-staffed front desk next semester, and as part of that process, we are looking to hire students to be OCF Operations staff for the 2017-2018 academic year! This includes two paid positions, Operations Assistant and Operations Manager, neither of which require any technical experience. These are very important roles, and without dedicated and passionate students to fill them, the OCF will not be able to stay open next semester.

Operations Assistants

Operations Assistants will have the following responsibilities:

  • Staffing the front desk
    • Maintaining lab security
    • Providing help to OCF members using the lab
    • Carrying out regular lab maintenance
  • Working on projects that benefit the OCF
    • Marketing and outreach
    • Collecting feedback on OCF services
    • Organizing events taking place in the lab
    • Researching and applying for additional sources of funding for the OCF
  • Attending regular meetings with the Operations Manager and the other Operations Assistants
This job position will be paid $13.75 per hour. See the full job description for more details.

Operations Manager

The Operations Manager will have the same responsibilities as the Operations Assistants (see above), except they will spend less time staffing the front desk of the OCF, and instead will spend the remaining time performing more managerial duties, such as leading meetings with the Operations Assistants, delegating projects, and scheduling shifts for the OCF front desk. This job will involve more responsibilities and use of communication skills than the Operations Assistant role, but it is also paid more, at $15.75 per hour. See the full job description for more details.

Application

Applications closed on Tuesday, April 7th at 11:59 PM. If you are interested in applying for a future position, you can contact us for more information.

  • 2 min read

OCF seeking interest in high-performance computing service

The OCF wants to hear from anyone who is interested in the possibility of participating in a free high-performance computing (HPC) service that we will be offering starting next academic year. Our eventual goal is to make intensive computational facilities student-run and freely avilable for all students and researchers in the UC Berkeley community.

Our current, tentative itinerary is to make an initial hardware purchase by the end of the spring 2017 semester, then purchase additional hardware in the fall based on input from interested parties and feedback from a trial run in the summer or early fall. Depending on the success of the service after it launches for the entire campus, we will consider expanding it in future years to accommodate even more projects of varying sizes and needs. To that end, we have created a survey for those who might like to see their project run on OCF hardware:

OCF HPC interest form

To anyone who may consider hosting a current or future project on our open computer infrastructure, we urge you to fill out this survey as best as you can, using estimations if you do not have all the hard data. We want to see the full breadth of projects on campus that have unmet computing needs. Our first server is planned to feature multiple high-end graphics cards, a many-core CPU, and spacious quantities of RAM and storage, but we will need as much input as we can get to make informed decisions if we want to make high-performance computing a reality for as many as possible.

To student groups in particular, we would like to select a few candidates for our trial run on limited hardware. We will use our experience on this outing to iron out wrinkles and anticipate obstacles that may come up during a full run. If this sounds interesting to you, please let us know in your response.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us!

  • 1 min read

OCF affirms support for EFF's Electronic Frontier Alliance

Board of Directors vote to support Electronic Frontier Alliance

Back in March, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched the Electronic Frontier Alliance, designed to bring together groups which support digital freedom, security, privacy, creativity, and access to knowledge.

The Open Computing Facility, a student organization founded in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley, believes strongly in the mission of the Electronic Frontier Alliance and of the EFF in general.

Since its inception, the OCF's all-volunteer staff base has worked hard to provide free and fair access to technology at UC Berkeley.

We hope to help others recognize the importance of digital rights, and their relation to free and open-source software.

  • 2 min read

Unveiling a new name for the Open Computing Facility

Board announces new name for the OCF.

Late Thursday night, the Board of Directors of the Open Computing Facility voted to rename the organization to the Open Facility for Computing (OFC).

"After seeing 'OCF' written as 'OFC' by people on Facebook, Twitter, and even by the Daily Cal's writers all in the same day, I decided it was worth bringing up at one of our meetings," said Chris Kuehl, the organization's former Site Manager. (Chris recently stepped down to focus on his studies.)

After a heated discussion (and short break to get boba), the members of the Board voted unanimously to adopt the new name and acronym.

"I try really hard to stay away from social media like Reddit and Facebook," said Nick Impicciche, the OFC's current General Manager. "Still, we're pretty strong believers in democracy, and it's clear what the people wanted."

After the decision was announced, OCF OFC technicians worked into the night to get the website moved from ocf.berkeley.edu to its new home at ofc.berkeley.edu.

In the coming days, we'll be reaching out to student groups using our web hosting to ask them to replace their now-outdated "Hosted by OCF" web banners. We're also working with facilities to get some stickers printed to cover up the signs in the hallways of MLK.

The Open Facility for Computing is an all-volunteer, student-run organization. It was founded in 1989 to serve the interests of the UC Berkeley campus community.

Questions about this change? Please reach out to devnull@ofc.berkeley.edu.

  • 6 min read

Changes to printing policies

We're changing our printing policies to match our new lab space. Here are the details about how and why.

Starting Tuesday, Feb 16th, the following daily printing limits will be in effect:

  • On weekdays, 8 pages per day.
  • On weekends, 16 pages per day.
  • Per semester, 100 pages*.

Last semester, we moved from our trusty old space in 6A Hearst Gym into our shiny new home in 171 MLK, more than twice the size and conveniently located in the ASUC Student Union.

The new lab is great: it's larger, more accessible, and has allowed us to serve many more users than in previous semesters, especially with the lab being open later.

However, coupled with the lab being open later, we've seen huge jumps in overall lab traffic. We're breaking records for the number of people in the lab and the number of pages being printed nearly every day. Even with the increased capacity, we're filling the lab nearly every day.

We want the lab to be a great place to work.

The lab is our most important asset, and we want it to be a great place for students to work, study, and collaborate. It doesn't serve its purpose when there's a 15-person long line to sit at a computer because people are waiting on printers.

Our vision for the lab is for it to be a collaborative space, not just the campus free printing hub. Printing is an important service, and we're not ending it. But we're expecting to spend over $13,000 on printing alone this year even after making the changes outlined here, and we just don't have the money to continue printing at the current level.

Lab usage from a busy day this semester. There are 27 computers in the lab.

We've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to meet our budget while impacting the fewest people. Below we'll describe the changes we're making and our rationale for them.

The daily quota is decreasing to 8 on weekdays, and 16 on weekends.

So far this semester, we've had an average of about 750 users in the lab each day. That's a huge jump from last semester, where the average was closer to 500.

Unfortunately, our resources haven't kept up with the increased demand. When you subtract out moving expenses, such as purchasing another 15 computers, monitors, and peripherals, our budget this year is less than it was last year in a space half the size.

Not only are we facing budget troubles, but our printers are starting to fail. They've both now printed over a million pages. They're several years old and starting to show it. The near-doubling of printing this semester has greatly increased the frequency of paper jams and other technical glitches (just ask the front desk staff).

The number of students using the lab each day has greatly increased since 2014, with an especially large jump after the move to MLK (last semester, around November 16, 2015).

Since 2013, we've gone from printing about 10,000 pages per week, up to almost 40,000 pages per week this semester.

We're running the printers at more than four times the manufacturer's recommended maximum pages per month. We don't have much of a choice; we have to limit the pages printed per day, or we risk breaking our printers beyond repair.

Historically, we've implemented a number of measures to manage our levels of printing, including draft-quality printing, lower-quality paper, and third-party toner. However, the OCF has never faced such a massive increase in number of users, lab usage, and printing before. Long-term members of the OCF will remember that the weekday printing limit was 10 pages per day in 2014. Our budget and lab usage levels back then allowed us to increase the limit to the limit announced at the beginning of the school year, but we have to reverse this decision.

We're continuing the tradition of allowing double the number of pages on weekends. While we understand this is less convenient, we hope this will help strike a balance between the needs of our members and the physical limits of our printers.

The semesterly quota is decreasing to 100 pages per semester.

We spent a lot of effort trying to find ways to cut costs while affecting the least number of people. The semesterly quota turns out to be one of the best places we can make that happen.

The average user prints only 61 pages per semester, while a very small number of users (about 7%) actually come close to exceeding their semesterly quota (printing more than 200 pages). These users have a disproportionate impact on our printing costs, so we're decreasing the semesterly quota to help limit that expense.

The decrease to 100 pages per semester will affect only about 20% of our users.

Of course, we know that many people pace their printing throughout the semester, and we want to ensure we're being fair. As such, we're not taking into account the number of pages you've already printed this semester*.

This means that you'll still have a full quota of 100 pages to work with for the rest of the semester, starting today.

Daily quota changes will take effect on Tuesday. Semesterly quotas have already been changed.

Starting on Tuesday, February 16th, the new daily quotas will be enforced. The grace period is intended to avoid penalizing people who had already planned to print large jobs in the next few days.

The semesterly quota change has already taken effect. We feel this is fair, as we're not affecting anyone's short-term plans. The reason for the immediate implementation is that it helps to avoid a rush to print in the coming days before a semesterly quota reset.

We know printing changes are inconvenient.

It's unfortunate that we have to make these changes, and we hope that in future semesters we can find the resources to raise quotas again.

In addition the the OCF lab, we'd also like to remind you that there are other places to print on campus, such as the libraries, the ResComp-run labs in the dorms, and your program's computer labs (e.g. Dwinelle Language Lab, Athlete's Printing Room, Soda Hall).

In the mean time, we hope you'll continue to use the OCF lab in its entirety; the convenient location, open space, and comfy furniture make it a great place to work between classes or late at night.

Our volunteer student staff are always open to hearing your thoughts. If you'd like to get in touch, feel free to contact us, or come to one of our weekly meetings on Tuesdays at 7:10pm in the lab.

* We won't take into account pages you've already printed this semester, with the exception of members who have already have a balance of less than 100 pages; for these members (only about 15 of them), we won't modify or lower your balance at all.