January 2010

On Tuesday, January 26, 2010, we will have a scheduled downtime from 4:00am to 8:00am EST.

This downtime affects all users of the department\’s computing and networking infrastructure.

Scheduled work includes:

• Upgrade CS Dropbox
• Upgrade of rinse, spin, and opus to CentOS 5.4
• Upgrade of the c2 cluster to Rocks 5.2
• Upgrade two of our virtual machine servers
• Moving some infrastructure servers to a new rack

During some of the 4am-8am window, most of the services (e.g., E-mail, web, cycle servers) will be unavailable. E-mail destined to the department will be queued and then delivered at the end of the maintenance window.

The upgrades to rinse, spin, opus, and the c2 cluster are a continuation of the work that was done in December.

SPECIAL NOTE: Since this is a re-install of the operating system for rinse, spin, and opus, any user-installed crontabs on these specific machines will be lost. You will need to back up your crontabs before the downtime, and restore them after.

The upgrade to CS Dropbox (our in-house assignment submission system) will include several of the enhancements requested by our course instructors in a December meeting. Details will be posted to the internal \”course-management\” mailing list.

The other work is part of the normal maintenance of the department infrastructure.